Commenting at the 28 day mark before the thread closed.
This topic turned super interesting.
I always prefer the English word Liberty; as in we are supposed to be at liberty to choose the right and the good. Raw licentious freedom will enslave a person over time. See everyone enslaved by alcoholism and substance abuse with burned-brains sadly mumbling to themselves by the side of the road . Their freedom enslaved them over time.
Only striving for a higher calling will produce genuine liberty, which is actually the freedom that we most think we want. Pursuing licentious freedom is a losing proposition.
Anyway, super interesting because yes, it seems “free” is often missing the nuance you describe above as differentiated in the Slavic languages; and “free software” can just as easily be hijacked as anything else. Super interesting.
Meanwhile; I’ve used Firefox for years and years, but recently switched to Brave, and found Mandriva’s de-Googled Chrome to be very interesting as well. I liked that FF was not Chromium based, but I wasn’t sure what other options I had at this point. Played with Midori a bit, no complaints there. Ladybird is absolutely charming and it’s pinned to my taskbar, but delightfully pre-release-alpha-not-usable-whatever you call it so far.
I was amazed to find out the origin of the word slave comes from Slav, which completely changes the perception of it in the Western world. It’s ironic how many suffer from mental slavery and will never discover this.
I just get annoyed at people saying “mu freEEEdumm mannn” and their idea of freedom is free drugs, nude parades, sex work and porn for all, and on an on…
In American history, that’s NOT what the founders of the nation were fighting for when they put it all on the line to become independent. It was to create a more perfect union.
I will not allow myself to get sucked into their definition of the word freedom. Super closely relating to the fascinating discussion of "Ein freier Mann” and “Freibier.” Free isn’t always free as we think it is.
Okay so, can we just focus on this topic? The Firefox Thingy.
Anyway, I want to make some points regarding the whole firefox thingy situation that I want to add my two cents into this conversation.
Firefox has always collected your personal data and has always been that way. Because of people not turning on a feature that collects data, which was 3% (This was from a random person on Youtube Comments from firefox videos situation). Which the update became opt-out (Which means that it was gonna be on by default) instead of opt-in (Which means that you can simply turn it off or on, if you want to participate in it). There is also a on-going telemetry thingy in the background that is going on right now.
FireFox was never a Privacy Respecting in the first place after 2014 or somewhere in some other timeline since their Privacy Policy, and their new terms of service which caused a lot of trust issues to the point of abandonment and finding a new solution such as a Chromium Based browser such as Ungoogled Chromium or Brave, or a Gecko based browser based on Firefox such as Zen or Floorp, or even Mullvad and LibreWolf. However, sometimes these browsers have the same, little to moderate spyware coming from Mozilla FireFox. Not to mention that they are now a AI Focused Company as we speak.
The political problems is actually another big issue we gonna need to address here, most of us want to stay apolitical and that’s okay, that’s why I also want to stay apolitical even though I am active in politics, which I would rather keep that rant to myself. FireFox or even Mozilla are Woke, which is a term for the awareness of “unjustice” or “social justice” or something like that. Which they spend that money on something useless, such as social justice or DEI in general. Lunduke demonstrated it very well on this topic. Which they claim they are spyware while also being politically woke and spreading their ideologies or “ideologists” to projects that somehow corrupted them.
Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and others have a so-called “Mozilla Sponsorship”, which is what Linux Mint did, which resulted being a monetary deal. Which can be seen in their blog posts when you look up “Mozilla”. What does that mean? That means that they could have the same ideologies as Mozilla has and if they were to stop shipping spyware “FireFox” (Not to mention Thunderbird is also affected by this spyware) or just do something about it, then they just comrades who just simply turn against them or just leave the bandwagon.
Original Sources: digdeeper[.]neocities[.]org[/]articles[/]mozilla[.]xhtml, spyware[.]neocities[.]org[/]articles[/]thunderbird, spyware[.]neocities[.]org[/]articles[/]firefox, web[.]archive[.]org[/web/]20240816175531[/https://]privacy[.]awiki[.]org[/]
And for that, these sources should prove me right for this, as I have noticed this discussion and I thought it was interesting while reading through this discussion.
Edit: Also about the whole Brave thing, yeah, they are also shady but I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t trust them, since they have improved over the years but what really bugged me out on this is the fact that they are also spyware: spyware[.]neocities[.]org[/]articles[/]brave
We are focusing on the topic. It has evolved into the gullibility of people manipulated by conflating what the term free means in FOSS. I’m sure you meant well, but it’s a little out of place to commandeer the topic and proceed to discuss the same things we were already discussing, anyway.
The abuse of the human condition is how you end up with browsers that claim to care about user privacy and security, but care about neither. To your point, no one reads EULA’s or ToS’s much less woke CoC’s (which the overwhelming majority is), let alone audits what their code is doing. The consumer mentality has led to a misplaced sense of trust based on brand recognition and consistency of product delivery. There are so few options, everyone holds their nose and uses the products they use including their software and OS.
The problem with foundations in general is they only are successful when large companies want to offload money in return for a tax break (i.e. donations), but they also attach conditions like governance and decision making. Eventually, it just becomes easier to put their employees on the board of the foundations similarly to how they lobby the governments and write the legislation that enables their monopoly. Mozilla and Linux are prime examples. When corporate donations, government ESG grants, and user interest vanishes these foundations and their projects will end. Everything else about what they are doing with that money whether it’s AI, or crypto, or selling your data is all on the downstream. There is no fixing these products using the old methods of project funding.
I do not read EULA’s or ToS’s, I do not read CoC’s, and I don’t know how to find the “bad” code anyway. I use whatever the smartest sounding sheeple suggest.
Imo, a browser should just render a web page safely and securely.
It does not need to be an operating system in its self.
Not every damn website needs to be an app either. Just display information in a human readable form. Adverts are old, stale and do absolutely nothing for the general public.
And for gods sake, find a different way of monetization than shoving ads in peoples faces every 2 seconds.
Most other distros that are “dropping” firefox aren’t removing it from their repos, they are just choosing a different default browser; see Zorin OS with Brave. So in that context there isn’t anything left to do since OpenMandriva ships with de-googled chromium as the default browser.
Have you tried duct tape? It works for me. I just put duct tape over the place on the screen where the ads appear. Retired truck drivers fix everything with rolls of duct tape. Even coolant hose and air line leaks.
I would think that pretty much all Linux users would have enough intelligence to choose the browser of their choice. They are not your typical Windows or MacBook user who uses whatever the elites at Microsoft and Apple tell them to use as in 1984.
Only Way to stop this and save FOSS is by building people awareness about that free or Libre stuff, it’s not costless stuff.
There was a guy on this forum who said “I will not pay / donate money for something that always was and is free”
It is free as long people that make it, can afford to make it free for us. But when they cant
a. they stop
b. a big company step up but with such and such conditions.
That’s the sole reason I will put money in OM whenever I can. Yes it will be pennies. Im unable to donate thousands. 20 bucks here, 10 bucks there.
Now let’s multiply on Polish idealistic “idiot” by a factor o 100 or 1000. In that case, a corporation that tries to hijack a distro can kiss its ass good bay. For simple reason, people who made distro can provide for their families without tying themselves with big tech.
I used Mozilla since day 1. I read their first service conditions and i read the last. Let just say there i a fucking big difference between those two.
Yet I still use FF and TB i have gut feeling that all this hype and disturbance around Mozilla is carefully crafted to put them out of business. Gecko is the one and only engine that is not developed by google right now. Sites are design specifically to be hard for FF to process, this is not coincidence. Web standards are crafted and tailored for chrome. Ringing a bell, anyone?
It makes you wonder what Google meant when they said, “Don’t be evil.”
These are also people with no interest in the growth of the project or donating time to help make it better. They just don’t want to pay for Windows or Apple because profit is evil.
The other thing people have not considered. Labor without consent and compensation is slavery. This concept completely escapes those people that don’t value the things they consume because they didn’t do anything to earn them. Even worse than creating unrealistic expectations of the consumers, it will eventually burn people out as they feel the stress of it.
For other browser engines, KHTML still exists as does Goanna. With Ladybird being looked to as the next thing, it’s possible we will see it fall victim to the same issues that Mozilla and Firefox had. The wrong kind of money behind it and the redirection of goals and values.
And let’s not forget that they sell your data to advertisers. Their horrible communications, and Mozilla advertising by a new CEO named Lora Chambers.
Yes, I know people like me promote independence like we all do but come on, countless evidence exist like these: Mozilla - Devil Incarnate
Really, come on, they are woke and have leftists in their corporate offices and their foundation as well, part of the LGBTQIA people who over throw the co-founder who worked at Mozilla, and it was a problem. Google pays Mozilla to use their Google search, which is honestly horrendous and funny at the same time.
. Their freedom enslaved them over time.
Retired truck drivers fix everything with rolls of duct tape. Even coolant hose and air line leaks.