It’s not, really. Politics and bureaucracy don’t belong in a business/customer transaction without consent. By that, I mean if a company makes a shirt that says, “I hate philosophers!” and you want to buy a shirt that says that, then you consent to buy the shirt and the business consented to making it and supplying the good. That should be the extent of it. It would be to the business’ benefit to also make a shirt that says, “I love philosophers!” because it would maximize the amount of people that would buy shirts and increase the wealth of the owner. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. Nothing else about what the owner does in his free time should have any bearing on the business itself. Businesses that don’t focus on their products and their customers will fail, as will FOSS projects. It’s just a matter of time and money, and when both will run out.
I’m not sure what you are asking here.
What I will say, is that CoC’s as a concept are only meant for three things:
- Treating the people required to abide by them like immature children, which suggests the project growth is stagnant, and the leadership does not have the ability to accurately judge the skillsets of new members. Instead they allow anyone in with special privileges granted to people not part of their biological, social, or ethnic group. Mostly to pad contributor numbers.
- Creating a one sided enforcement strategy to keep logical people from inquiring about, criticizing, or challenging the special privileges explained in point # 1.
- Being algorithmically targeted for government grants based on the CoC they have adopted, or created theirs from.
As such, I can’t really recommend any one that may enlighten others or aid in a strong project. Lunduke had a good one a while back from B&T’s Excellent Adventure:
“Be excellent to each other.”
Sadly, that concept is too straightforward for some people and multiple layers of nuance would need to be created by them to seem more intellecutal than they actually are and entitled posturing would abound.
I think you mean Aesthetic or even Semiotics. A bad product is still a product and addicted customers are great for business but bad for society.
That is the tricky thing with consent. Bad product is also subjective.
I’m not familiar with the ones you are talking about, but there is a certain product I know of that has killed 2 people that I knew first hand, and another that was the spouse of someone I know first hand. The reason why that company still is in existence, is flourishing, and the product is still on the market is because of oligarch collusion and public funding. In a true free economy, they could just lose all of their money because no one is buying their products anymore. That cannot be achieved so long as the companies are subsidized, and the potential to be forced to fund or buy their product exists. This is the exact opposite of consumers giving informed consent.
I think the only way to get there is with Henry George’s economic theory, but that’s a conversation for different thread.
I’ll at two cents to this, and let’s be honest and transparent here, since we all do.
I use both GMail and Microsoft Outlook, while I don’t exactly use them. One is used for creating docs, forms for things like jobs or something, idk. The other? Never will and never will be. Or at least there is no good use to it anyway once I will log in into a Microsoft account during installation, which I don’t mind. But I do mind is privacy so, nope, no login. But really, I gotta sometimes use those for separate things.
Now, onto the privacy and security stuff: I also use ProtonMail, and their services like Proton VPN. But really. I gotta use some other alternatives since if I am here to sign up for services under their proton mail service which is, by the way, free tier, then, I would get removed from their service. I mean, isn’t that what a email service is supposed to be? Come on! I really need an alternative but they do suck. Tuta? Not so fast. RiseUp? Never because of invite only. Others, I am not sure which one is the best alternative without the paid ones because of me being in poverty, especially my family also.
I mean, should I be glad? Or should I change?
As I mentioned in the other thread SR, you just do the best you can, and go forward and work hard, get better jobs over time, and enjoy your life!
It’s fun to explore options, but don’t let it drive you mad 
Life IS INDEED bigger then computers Grass is still outside as they say.
Lots of grass. Trees too. My advice is to take off for two weeks and take a road trip to see the trees and grass, along with anything else that appears along the way. The destination is not the only goal. Getting there is the fun.
Anyway, I just got back from a 10-day road trip almost two weeks ago, and I am already planning the next two-week road trip. To where? I won’t know until I get there. Two lane country highways with little traffic are more relaxing than airports and airlines.
And when not doing a road trip, work hard at what you do and learn new skills for your work.
Those are SERIOUSLY the best kind of trips. That sounds awesome Great advice.
I have three email providers:
- Riseup.net (don’t care for their politics, but it is reasonably secure)
- Protonmail
- sdf.org (more cool stuff than just free email accounts!)
I’ll put in a plug for fastmail - I’ve been using them for years. If you count the company they purchased (pobox) I’ve been using them since the 1990s. Only last year did they fold POBox into fastmail proper.
They have really nice business and family plans. Their web interface is easy, as I recall the app is good (I use Lineage now so I don’t bother with email on my phone - even though I could).
And IMAP is IMAP, POP is POP. So it works with every client. Calendar, contacts, and storage space works really well with tux (caldav, carddav, webdav)
You could also get a domain and just go any hosting provider (godaddy, a2, hostgator, etc) and get their email plan and use that
I use proton for day to day use (not including the million gmx accounts for random web portals)
One for banking stuff only, never had any spam. and another for general use.
Because i can link my own domain to it without the hassle of self hosting which is beyond my privacy stance as long as the e2ee stands.
Has the advantage of being able to prepend any sign ups eg OM-myname@mydomain.com so i could tell who was selling my info. And block the account if needed.
I use tuta too, but more as a quick “less secure than my self hosted 2fa nextcloud” note pad.
Am i 100% happy with proton, no.
Can I advocate for a mostly better email provider business model with my money, yes.
Is it also a basic privacy education tool vs google (etc), also yes.
If whistle blower privacy was my aim then self encryption before sending would be the only way, whichever service. But there is always metadata.
Beyond the scope of someones gaming accounts though.
Just wanted to revisit this and say that Fastmail shows promise. From what I can tell, they focus on just providing the services and nothing else. With a small exception that they give back to open source projects and use the same products in their stack.
They have a 30 day trial, and then it’s $60/yr. for a single user. It supports regular mail clients, and should support PGP for those that want to make their own encryption keypairs.
I can confirm it does support PGP. You will need to use a mail client though - not from the web ui. That’s a good thing though; anytime you have to store your keys on the server to use them means they’re not your keys.
On my phone I have used their app, Kmail, and ios mail.
On the desktop I have used:
MS Outlook
Gnome
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Gnome Online Accounts
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Gnome Calendar
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Gnome Contacts
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Gnome Evolution
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Thunderbird
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Claws
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Sylpheed
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Kontact
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Geary
webdav to connect to the online storage space (works great with Nemo/Nautilus too) Haven’t tried yet with dolphin, but I don’t expect issues
I am using FairEmail with DAVx5 to sync storage.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Murena yet. This is the “cloud” part of the e/OS/ project. It’s awesome. Easy to use with your FOSS apps, all the webmail stuff they use is also FOSS.
I would not recommend it. When their services failed for almost a year I couldn’t even delete my account. They took people’s money and did not pay for competent staff, then had the nerve to crowdfund for more after telling everyone their current needs were being met and they wanted to get funding for more services.
I use Proton Mail for my business. It works very well for me.
Proton as a company has some questionable political issues, but I can’t afford to be idealistic about these tools. I need reliable email that works with custom domains and a calendar I can sync between devices without tinkering. I cannot compromise on these in the name of purity. Still better than Google.
On some things, like my OS, it makes sense to pay the “open source tax” (extra effort and headache), because of the benefits conveyed in return. However, if I cannot communicate, I can not operate so it is not worth it to even try for me.
Everything is always a trade-off. Everything.
People should only compromise to the extent that they absolutely must. It’s not solely about the politics of the people that work at a place. I couldn’t care less about that. The issue is if the company’s political stance is used to acquire funding from government grants, or as a condition of government contracts. Much of the company’s beginnings were seeded by intelligence agency money (a.k.a. your money). If you feel that part is a bit too conspiratorial (though well documented), then consider the business implications.
Companies that focus on ESG washing their business do not care about their products or services. They care about fulfilling stakeholder requirements to continue getting investment. This investment does not require them to compete in the free market on the merits of their product. It just requires them to repeat the mantra and they get paid. This is also often grant money (a.k.a. your money). Their service additions (drive, VPN, etc…) coincided with adopting a Code of Conduct on their Mail source code as well as other source code repos they have.
The difference in these two scenarios is essentially the same thing as Google minus the data harvesting to the extent Alphabet does. You are paying for the service on top of the money you paid in taxes funding the company providing the service. They are double dipping.
With all that said, everyone has to decide what their mitigation strategy is. I just hope to educate people about their options and make sure they have informed consent.
I don’t like the people who run Proton services, but I do still use some of their free tier services. As a loyal citizen of the People’s Democratic non-Republic of Kanada, I’m sure some of my tax money went to them, Canada, as a whole, both institutionally and much of the population, is more woke than the people at Proton, but, if one keeps one’s moth shut and keeps one’s head down, we still enjoy a lot of freedom, at least in rural Canada.