FOSS adware and spyware apps are rare because it’s trivial to fork it and remove the undesirable elements. Users have every incentive to use the ad-free and spyware-free forks, which eventually causes the superior user-friendly forks to overtake the originals. However, proprietary adware and spyware apps cannot be forked in the same way, preventing users from stripping out the ads and tracking. The ability to use, modify, and redistribute “trash software” allows anyone to transform FOSS with undesirable elements into excellent software by removing such elements, whereas proprietary “trash software” remains trashy.
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The 5 people who disagree with you:
- https://lemmy.world/post/27621659/16166832
- https://lemmy.world/post/27621659/16169993
- https://lemmy.world/post/27621659/16178508
- https://lemmy.world/post/27621659/16178552
- Me
And, no, you making baseless assertions while attacking everyone who disagrees with you does not count as evidence.
It’s actually 5 people vs. you right now, and anyone can count to confirm it. Calling out the fact that you have produced zero evidence for your wild claims is not “wanting to lie”, it’s just stating what any observer can see.
You said that your “reasoning is experience”, so let this conversation be an experience that challenges your perception of what others think about FOSS.
FOSS has this reputation among most people.
Source? Every commenter here disagrees with you, so it seems like your wild claim is not supported by any evidence.
When you look at any app store, you’ll find that the many apps that are infested with ads, spyware, malware, and dark patterns are pretty much always proprietary. Conversely, any FOSS application that tries to introduce such garbage would be forked to remove these offending attributes, which makes FOSS much higher-quality than proprietary software in general.
You are using false equivalence by incorrectly implying that proprietary software is commercial while FOSS is not. Both FOSS and proprietary software can be sold and commercialized with various monetization strategies. For example, you are currently using Lemmy, a FOSS social network whose development is funded by donations. Nobody here believes that Reddit is better on the basis that it is proprietary adware instead of FOSS.
Free and open source software licenses provide users the right to use, modify, and redistribute the software. Proprietary software does not. That difference makes FOSS inherently better for users than proprietary software.
Proprietary software is also notoriously low-quality and can disappear at any time when the developer loses motivation. Additionally, because the software is closed source, nobody else is able to continue the development of proprietary abandonware. On the other hand, abandoned FOSS projects can be forked and continued, which is something I see often.
airglow@lemmy.worldto Technology@lemmy.world•Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations (link to 2025 Priorities -> Focus on Reliabilty, Audi, Camera, etc)English9·13 days agoHere’s a demonstration of Waydroid on FuriOS and the accompanying blog post from 6 months ago. I’m obviously not a fan of X (Twitter), but the video shows that the app works in the Android container.
Yes, I also hope to see the price go down.
airglow@lemmy.worldto linuxmemes@lemmy.world•They'll cast you back to the Windows realm with all their toxic mightEnglish10·13 days agoMost of the people I’ve introduced to Linux don’t even use the shell. Beginner-friendly Linux distros are perfectly usable without ever touching a terminal, just as most people use Windows without ever touching PowerShell (or worse, the Registry Editor).
airglow@lemmy.worldto Technology@lemmy.world•Do you dislike your dependency on Android? To the rescue comes Mobile Linux "PostmarketOS" - Funded via Donations (link to 2025 Priorities -> Focus on Reliabilty, Audi, Camera, etc)English321·13 days agoThe FuriPhone, which runs the FuriOS Linux distribution (based on Debian), has a polished enough user experience that it can be used as a daily driver by many people.
airglow@lemmy.worldto Technology@lemmy.world•Organic Maps migrates to Forgejo due to GitHub account blocked by Microsoft.English61·17 days agoAnd VSCodium is the project that releases builds from the VS Code source code. Privacy-conscious developers should use VSCodium (which is fully FOSS) instead of Visual Studio Code (which is partially proprietary and includes tracking).
airglow@lemmy.worldto Technology@lemmy.world•Apple ordered by EU regulators to open up to rivals.English6·25 days agoNintendo restricting game and app access on the Switch is also anticompetitive. However, Apple’s anticompetitive restrictions on iOS are a higher-priority problem because smartphones are essential communication devices while video game consoles are not.
Gumroad made itself more transparent by releasing its source code and becoming a source-available project. That deserves recognition, even though Gumroad is not open source due to its restrictive license. Software is only open source if it does not discriminate against any person or group, even when the discrimination is viewed as positive.