Oof, looks like @purism also forked "OpenVPN for Android" https://github.com/schwabe/ics-openvpn without mentioning, as well. Which is GPLv2.
Like, the least a corporation could do is follow basic legality here, right? Or basic decency in stating that they just forked 4 popular Android apps and are calling that a service?
Actually, even the iOS apps are just forks of iOS apps (Amaroq and Riot at least -- I can't find the VPN app they probably forked). And no Librem Mail, because, well... there are no good email apps on iOS. 😩
OK, so I found @purism source at source.puri.sm (which wasn't advertised anywhere on the Librem One site or app listings, still). Looks like the source is published (and therefore not violating GPL), but this could still be put somewhere more prominent.
OK, now this is seriously interesting: #Purism's fork of the #Mastodon server (known as #Smilodon) has two particular changes that caught my eye.
First, they disabled the public timelines, as well as private posts: https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/5c02796594b73908cd8197d2f72d17b7c9760d10
Second, they disabled reports? https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon/commit/9cae431902a2c0ce6438c6722a3a901e279c78fc
I can maybe understand the first one. Maybe they just want to focus purely on timelines. And technically, private posts aren't perfectly secure. So you can reduce complexity by just removing those two features overall.
But why would you remove reports entirely, then? Not only does this mean librem.one users can't report any abuse, but also incoming reports about abusers on librem.one will be rejected.
It's one thing to simply not implement federated reports, but it's another to strip it out...
@trwnh You’re giving people too much credit. They don’t care at the end of the day for stealing other people work without crediting. It’s a horrible culture of if it’s on the internet it’s free to use as I want without crediting the original because I said “No copyright intended”.
@TheKuroKuma Still, you'd expect better out of a "social purpose corporation" or whatever SPC is supposed to stand for. It's not even about freedom of usage necessarily, it's about attribution. People tend to confuse the two.
@trwnh i can barely understand the technical nitty gritty here, but.. god bless you for going through this absolute trainwreck
stripping out the ability to report abuse. amazing. this is absolutely peak tech dudebro
@trwnh it's weird but the mission statement does mention a full suite of moderation and filtering tools (https://source.puri.sm/liberty/smilodon)
Maybe there's a plan to reimplement, perhaps differently?
Also the April 1st commit date did catch my eye but it's maybe not relevant.
@brainblasted @trwnh something does not compute, indeed
@kaniini smilodons for the smilodon god
@trwnh Wait a minute, these rebranded applications and services are not even ports to their own Debian-based phone OS?
What the what?
@therealraccoon PureOS "coming soon", obviously! They haven't ~found enough apps to fork yet~ (well, there's Fractal -> Chatty)
@trwnh Maybe, just maybe they should deliver on the whole libre phone platform thing first?
You know, as in the reason people are actually kind of interested in what they're trying to do?
@libc @sean @therealraccoon i'd much rather see purism focus on their own platform instead of chasing down others. why add more value to android/ios?
they're not offering anything new, even. people can just use amaroq/tusky/k9-mail/riot/openvpn/pia as-is. why maintain forks at parity just for a rebrand?
@libc @sean @therealraccoon disagree that nextcloud and e are enough, or even good services for the most part. they're fine for personal use but most people are not going to go to the effort of setting up their own services.
@libc @sean @therealraccoon looks like they use LDAP and autofill the domain at least.
@sean @therealraccoon well they're not going about it in an effective way, if that's their strategy
i'm not against purism offering services, and in fact, i think that they should! but they need to do it in a way that makes sense. more like google than like apple. pretty much no one uses apple's services; pretty much everyone uses google's.
if that means running their own mastodon/matrix/mail servers, fine, cool. there's certainly room for more service providers like disroot.
@trwnh agree wish #thunderbird was available I use it on my Mac at work
And Librem Chat is just Riot for Android https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android which is at least Apache 2.0... which still requires prominent notice of derivative work.
Comments? @purism