Being a non-profit doesn’t give them a pass on making bad products. Being open source doesn’t give a free pass on bad products. If they choose a unsustainable business model, where making profit ruins their product, then they created this problem themselves.
I run Chromium, it probably spies on me, but it doesn’t do it in my face, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
When I run Firefox, they say they care, but they shamelessly bundle that crapware. Makes me wonder if another day after another Firefox update they’ll add Pocket 2.0 without me knowing.
It’s the same issue I have with Brave as well, I cannot stand the BAT integration.
Because they keep churning out garbage. And the only "good" stuff they do make, they don't open source, or even release it on multiple platforms.
Not to mention the fact that they are extremely user hostile. Putting ads in a paid for OS? And mining private data. If their OS was free I'd at least say they had an excuse to do that.
They're just a cursed company. Their culture is so disconnected from what users want that they're incapable of ever making a good product. Nothing will ever change within them, no matter how many times they remind us that they Love Open Source.
Exactly, they were doing fine until they made a point to shit on all open source software instead of limiting their focus to this one, Microsoft-sponsored outfit.
They chose a business model built on open source, and now they don't like it because they can't suck enough profit from it. Maybe they should just build their own proprietary operating system from scratch.
Good riddance. I hate Big$G creepily tracking all of my internet search history from Chromium by default unless I explicitly turned it off.
But its cute that people still think that Big companies contribute to Open Source because they want to "give back". Hell no ! It has been about reaping free, complex technical labour, monopolies (chrome, kubernetes) and marketing for hiring devs.
It doesn’t matter to me if the X.org developers have decided not to do their jobs, which is maintaining X.org. This isn’t proof that X.org is bad, it just shows that giggers who really work for big tech firms shouldn’t also be trusted to maintain Free software.
I’ve noticed them slowly trying to ruin X.org for a couple years now, deprecating drivers for no reason whatsoever, etc.
They're ruining their brand image. It's hard to be considered trustworthy when it appears like you compromise your values due to financial hardship. It reminds me of the Ubuntu Amazon integration thing as well. One of the Cardinal rules of free software seems to be don't sell your users by forcing 3rd party integration nobody asked for.
You know, it serves them right. They’re a major part of the opaque, shitty “enterprise” software ecosystem that over-promises, under-delivers, and somehow manages to bag a fortune in the process. Looks like they’re eating their own dog food on this one.
I was bitten too and I'll probably avoid their products & platforms in the future. What I see very positive from them is the act of contributing back. Perhaps they are maturing...
Nonetheless, you can be a SOB of a profit and world domination seeking corporation and embrace open source at the same time. Think Oracle or Google (and many others).
Agree. Its amazing technology in the hands of the worst possible company. It can run anything, JavaScript,
Java, Rust.
Every time I get to the download page, and despite
all the claims around the Community edition OS licenses,
it just reminds me who is behind it.
I think the trick is that they might just drop their efforts behind the Community Edition anytime. The Open Source license its not a guarantee. Any Open Source team that would decide to pick up the engineering effort would have them coming around and claiming some kind of license infringement.
Open source isn't enough. The tricky, some times forced, telemetry in their software is unforgivable. It's been a while since I checked, maybe they addressed those concerns, but it's too late, the trust is destroyed.
You're kidding, right? Professing love for Open Source by releasing a code editor or buying GitHub is one thing, profit margins are another. Why would they voluntarily help in increasing desktop Linux market share? It's literally in the worst interests of the company.
Funding has changed, I agree. I hope that some entity could provide some type of crowd-funded solution for a general purpose desktop environment, but am more than pessimistic.
My opinion of Chrome OS is that it is a cancer and I don't want Google anywhere near anything to do with the free software movement. I don't want their kernel pushes, I don't want their libraries and I don't want their opinion. Yes, I am an extremist, but Google and Facebook (and others) are not ethical partners. I have made compromises in the past and they have yielded nothing of value to me.
Thank you for funding the work for Linux on M1. That really does matter!
Why engage with a company that have proven themselves to be an enemy of Free Software? I'm not buying their "how do you do, fellow Linux users" facade.
Their primary product is still proprietary, and if that's not bad enough, it's essentially completely spyware at this point.
I don't want to use their crap open source products so I can integrate with their crap proprietary SaaS ecosystem.
Just because they're finally deciding to release some token software with some level of open source, and buying political influence via the linux foundation, doesn't make them a friend of free software. There is more to free software than just the license: their strategy of vendor-lockin via Terms of Service instead of EULA, they are merely seeking to 'vendorize' free software projects to integrate with their paid products.
I run Chromium, it probably spies on me, but it doesn’t do it in my face, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
When I run Firefox, they say they care, but they shamelessly bundle that crapware. Makes me wonder if another day after another Firefox update they’ll add Pocket 2.0 without me knowing.
It’s the same issue I have with Brave as well, I cannot stand the BAT integration.
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