Nobody has any objection to companies making their source code available, and they are free to call their software “source-available”, “source-first”, or some other term because their source code is available. But if they restrict what users can do with the software, then it isn’t open source. MongoDB, Redis, and even FUTO now all recognize this distinction.

The FOSS community, at large, doesn’t tolerate the watering down of recognized terms such as “open source” by bad actors who want to co-opt the term for marketing while denying users the right to use open source software for any purpose. That is known as openwashing. This kind of misappropriation is not welcome in any kind of movement, not just the FOSS movement.

The free software and open source software movements both support rights for users, which include the right to use free software and open source software for all commercial purposes without restriction. These movements support the release of source code as one requirement for ensuring these user rights, but source availability is not the only requirement for a piece of software to be open source.

There’s no problem with creating another classification of restricted source-available licenses as long as it isn’t called open source, a term rooted in the open source software movement’s adoption of the Open Source Definition for over 20 years.

As for myself, I personally prefer source-available software over software with no source available, though I also prefer FOSS over restrictively licensed source-available software.

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Proprietary source-available software existed before open source software, and that’s what these restricted licenses are. The FOSS community does not appreciate businesses co-opting the term open source to promote software that doesn’t grant users the right to use the source code for any purpose.

Yikes. I’ll be sticking with NewPipe and other FOSS apps.

Between these two options DuckDuckGo Browser is at least free and open source, while Vivaldi is closed source, which makes DuckDuckGo Browser the better choice.

Firefox and its forks are better than both. Firefox’s Gecko engine is independent of Google and Apple, while Vivaldi uses Google’s Blink engine and DuckDuckGo Browser uses either Blink or Apple’s WebKit engine depending on platform.

Hey, I think you’re totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn’t release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there’s reason to suspect that the data is biased.

I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don’t subscribe to their data service, I don’t have details of the methodology here, either.

Frankly, I’m not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.

Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in “48 markets”) use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.

My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they’re not just niche tools anymore.

Mull has defaults that improve privacy at the cost of performance and website compatibility. They maintain a list of changes that you can reverse through about:config. If Mull seems slow for you, consider re-enabling the JavaScript JIT.

Over half of all Americans use an ad blocker. It’s time to recognize that average users do block ads.

Tusky has been working very well for me on Android. There’s also Ice Cubes for iOS. Both are free and open source.

Any details on that? The full uBlock Origin works well on mobile and I don’t see how a lite version with reduced blocking effectiveness could be more useful.

That’s just the first thing that came to mind. Any product with consumable refills (razor blades, electric toothbrush heads, air/water filter replacements, etc.) would also work as an example.

Let’s say you want to buy a printer from a retailer. The retailer also sells replacement ink cartridges, and so does the printer manufacturer. The manufacturer prefers that you buy the ink cartridges directly from them, because their margins are higher when they don’t have to pay the retailer a cut.

To encourage customers to buy the cartridges directly from them, the manufacturer provides a link or QR code to their online ink cartridge store on the product box, printer manual, and another paper insert inside the box. The manufacturer might offer more competitive pricing than the retailer or some other enticement, like a coupon.

However, the retailer implements an anti-steering rule, preventing the printer manufacturer from providing a link or QR code to their online ink cartridge store on the product packaging, printer manual, or anything inside the box, as a requirement for the printer to appear on the retailer’s shelves. (As a result of corporate consolidation, there is only one other retailer in the entire country.) This is the equivalent of what Apple is doing to apps in their App Store: preventing developers from disclosing that users can purchase subscriptions or other app-related digital goods on the developer’s website.

Dell used to have pointing sticks (branded TrackStick or Dual Point) in some of their business laptops, but they removed them all in 2021. Lenovo is the last major laptop producer to use pointing sticks. Maybe System76 will come through?

PeerTube has a variety of third-party applications for Android, desktop, and a few other platforms.

The closest thing to Librewolf on Android is Mull. Keep in mind that some of the settings are different.

Here’s the feature request for a TrackPoint on a Framework. Hope they change their mind, because a pointing stick is the most obvious use case for Framework 16’s input modules.

This ThinkPad keyboard project for the Framework Laptop is worth keeping an eye on.

I still prefer Bitwarden because the server is source-available and most of the code is free and open source. There’s also the FOSS Vaultwarden server fork that I can switch to at any time.

Proton Pass also using end-to-end encryption with FOSS clients is nice, but the server code is completely closed source.

Avast should not be recommended.

In late 2019, Avast browser extensions were found to collect user data, including browsing behavior and history, and send it to a remote server. The discovery led to the extensions of the Avast and AVG brands being temporarily removed from the Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera extension stores, however, they returned a short time later as there was no concrete evidence that demonstrated a breach of private data of the users.

In January 2020, a joint investigation by Motherboard and PCMag found that the Avast Antivirus and AVG AntiVirus Free version were collecting user data, which was being resold to personalize advertising through a subsidiary, Jumpshot. The leaked documents showed that Jumpshot offered to provide its customers with “Every search. Every click. On every site.” from more than 100 million compromised devices. In response, Avast announced on January 30, 2020, that it would immediately shut down Jumpshot and cease all operations due to the backlash of its users’ data privacy.

On the basis of the information revealed, on 11 February 2020 the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection announced that it had initiated a preliminary investigation.

In February 2024, the Federal Trade Commission fined Avast $16.5 million for collecting user data and reselling that data. The collection was done under their program to ensure that such collection of user data was not happening.