Agree, OpenSource no neccessary is also free, it can also be paid software/services. For example ProtonVPN is OpenSource, but the free versión has only few servers and is restricted to one PC or Mobile, because servers cost money.
The sense of OpenSource is to make it easy to share and develope a new product, but the great error of most FOSS fans is to believe that FOSS is sinonym of security and privacy. It isn’t not more than in other soft and depends only of the intentions of the devs or the company behind it. A product, also FOSS is only so good as the maintance of it and the support community, nothing more dangerous as a FOSS discontinued or with a deficent maintance, als a hacker can see the source code and contamine it or see security holes, without the need to disensable it first.
I like and prefer FOSS, but I also don’t say that a product is crap when it isn’t FOSS. For a normal user is more important to read TOS and PP of anything he use, to avoid ugly surprises.
I don’t mind using a reputable freeware with a good privacy policy, if it offers better features than FOSS alternatives. For example, a good software such as the famous IrfanView (unfortunately only for Windows, although it works well with Wine in Linux), does not have an real equivalent in functionality in the FOSS alternatives, well, Nomacs Image Lounge is the closest.
Fanatism is the biggest error also in this ambit, where only count the common sense.
Free Software also isn’t necessarily gratis!! Free as in freedom, not free beer (even though usually free beer too).
eg…Linux would be more open source (even though it has a free license) / linux-libre would be free.
It is not a synonym of security per se, but free software can be audited if you have the desire and know how - open source can mostly be audited, however there is still often “binary blobs” as is the case with vanilla Linux.
You probably know from other posts of mine that I use Vivaldi as the main browser, it’s distributed as freeware, because it’s not entirely OpenSource, the UI scripts are Vivaldi’s proprietary, but it’s not like Chrome, where only the Chromium part is OpenSource and the rest closed source no auditable, in Vivaldi 100% of the script is auditable and the proprietary part can be modified by the user, in the community they even teach how (although of course at their own risk), but only for personal use, Google and others cannot fork it for their own browsers. I think it is a reasonable measure to survive for a small cooperative in a market saturated with Chromiums, which are also used by the largest in this market (Google and M$), nothing to do with freedom
It is at this point that the OpenSource designation becomes quite relative and irrelevant, in a market of over 100 browser forks and another 70 already discontinued, obsolete or abandoned projects.
That is to say, in a software market saturated with one type of product, being OpenSource, this meaning now only acquires a purely academic status, nothing to do with freedom. Les in a market stagnant with only three engines since 20 years.
Same with the search engines, the best most stables privacy focused are almost proprietary services (Startpage, DDG, Qwant, Andi, Lilo and a lot of others), well, there are also OpenSource engines, like SearX instances (Metasearch) or Whoogle (Google Engine), but there are teh need to use public instances if you don’t have a own server and the results are very deficient, mostly te image search don’t work well.
But, my point was OSI was NEVER about freedom or anything other than source code. Free Software is the political of the two VERY different movements. You could argue that Free Software (not gratis, freeware or whatever else you bring up - yuck!) has become irrelevant - but not to me :)
I understand, but what I mean is that in some products with more than 100 forks, it becomes somewhat irrelevant if you have the source or not, independent of this, as I mencioned before, in the case of the freeware browser Vivaldi, offers political more freedom for the user as some so called FOSS browser, forked and controled by Google and others.
I mean, that the philosophy and meaning of FOSS in recent years, since the big monopolies, such as Google, M$, Facebook, Amazon, etc, have appropriated it, has been quite distorted, especially in mass products, independent of paid or not.
For a normal user it is irrelevant whether they can download the source code or not, if for 99,9% of them it is the same as an old Chinese document. In other words, freedom basically depends on other factors, starting with the conditions of use, a strong community and the company’s ethics regarding the user.
Agree, OpenSource no neccessary is also free, it can also be paid software/services. For example ProtonVPN is OpenSource, but the free versión has only few servers and is restricted to one PC or Mobile, because servers cost money. The sense of OpenSource is to make it easy to share and develope a new product, but the great error of most FOSS fans is to believe that FOSS is sinonym of security and privacy. It isn’t not more than in other soft and depends only of the intentions of the devs or the company behind it. A product, also FOSS is only so good as the maintance of it and the support community, nothing more dangerous as a FOSS discontinued or with a deficent maintance, als a hacker can see the source code and contamine it or see security holes, without the need to disensable it first. I like and prefer FOSS, but I also don’t say that a product is crap when it isn’t FOSS. For a normal user is more important to read TOS and PP of anything he use, to avoid ugly surprises. I don’t mind using a reputable freeware with a good privacy policy, if it offers better features than FOSS alternatives. For example, a good software such as the famous IrfanView (unfortunately only for Windows, although it works well with Wine in Linux), does not have an real equivalent in functionality in the FOSS alternatives, well, Nomacs Image Lounge is the closest. Fanatism is the biggest error also in this ambit, where only count the common sense.
Free Software also isn’t necessarily gratis!! Free as in freedom, not free beer (even though usually free beer too). eg…Linux would be more open source (even though it has a free license) / linux-libre would be free.
It is not a synonym of security per se, but free software can be audited if you have the desire and know how - open source can mostly be audited, however there is still often “binary blobs” as is the case with vanilla Linux.
You probably know from other posts of mine that I use Vivaldi as the main browser, it’s distributed as freeware, because it’s not entirely OpenSource, the UI scripts are Vivaldi’s proprietary, but it’s not like Chrome, where only the Chromium part is OpenSource and the rest closed source no auditable, in Vivaldi 100% of the script is auditable and the proprietary part can be modified by the user, in the community they even teach how (although of course at their own risk), but only for personal use, Google and others cannot fork it for their own browsers. I think it is a reasonable measure to survive for a small cooperative in a market saturated with Chromiums, which are also used by the largest in this market (Google and M$), nothing to do with freedom It is at this point that the OpenSource designation becomes quite relative and irrelevant, in a market of over 100 browser forks and another 70 already discontinued, obsolete or abandoned projects. That is to say, in a software market saturated with one type of product, being OpenSource, this meaning now only acquires a purely academic status, nothing to do with freedom. Les in a market stagnant with only three engines since 20 years. Same with the search engines, the best most stables privacy focused are almost proprietary services (Startpage, DDG, Qwant, Andi, Lilo and a lot of others), well, there are also OpenSource engines, like SearX instances (Metasearch) or Whoogle (Google Engine), but there are teh need to use public instances if you don’t have a own server and the results are very deficient, mostly te image search don’t work well.
But, my point was OSI was NEVER about freedom or anything other than source code. Free Software is the political of the two VERY different movements. You could argue that Free Software (not gratis, freeware or whatever else you bring up - yuck!) has become irrelevant - but not to me :)
I understand, but what I mean is that in some products with more than 100 forks, it becomes somewhat irrelevant if you have the source or not, independent of this, as I mencioned before, in the case of the freeware browser Vivaldi, offers political more freedom for the user as some so called FOSS browser, forked and controled by Google and others.
I mean, that the philosophy and meaning of FOSS in recent years, since the big monopolies, such as Google, M$, Facebook, Amazon, etc, have appropriated it, has been quite distorted, especially in mass products, independent of paid or not. For a normal user it is irrelevant whether they can download the source code or not, if for 99,9% of them it is the same as an old Chinese document. In other words, freedom basically depends on other factors, starting with the conditions of use, a strong community and the company’s ethics regarding the user.