Hmmm the main issue is not an App Store. It is rather how Android is packaged. There is F-Droid type of store out there, it is just that it is not in the play store. As for iOS there really no proper way to install except jailbreaking any way. The bottom we don't need another App Store, rather a FOSS distribution of OS for Android (e.g: https://www.replicant.us/about.php ) that kind like the Debian distro for desktop Linux. As for iOS, is Darwin still open source, maybe a distro for iPhone with an open source Darwin fork?
yeah, so? Android's user-space is still mostly open-source. What's open-source of iOS is basically useless for developing an alternative OS for iPhones.
F-Droid doesn't enroll as device administrator on your phone. I think Microsoft could easily pull that off if they wanted to which would let them push updates and manage applications the way Google does. My workplace already basically runs BYOD devices through some Microsoft Azure management thing.
Sounds like a great way to create incentives that undermine githubs mission while simultaneously taking a huge amount of developer resources for a product that will have niche interest at best.
Building app stores is hard. Moderating app stores is hard. Both are significantly different from running GitHub.
While I appreciate the author's intent here, this just doesn't feel like it was deeply thought out.
I don't know though, Microsoft already runs multiple app stores (Xbox & Windows, Edge). I don't see why they couldn't build it out for another platform or at least figure out some kind of arms-reach integration with Github -> Microsoft Store.
This could be a nice come back into the mobile sphere they lost out on. As a developer, I completely agree that Microsoft earned my trust over the years.
FF only removed the SSB (site specific browser) feature on desktop which was in an alpha state. There was no announcement that Mozilla was going to remove the entire PWA features (such as service workers).
PWA is a set of modern web standards. "Supporting PWA" can mean many things but "Removing unfinished SSB" doesn't mean "Removing PWA".
> The pendulum has shifted, and it's swinging towards PWA.
It has for some things, and for others native is king. Native just delivers experiences that PWA can’t (yet).
To take a simple example - let’s consider a ‘timer app’. On iPhone I ask Siri to set me a timer for 5 minutes, it sets the timer and I walk away from my phone. 15 minutes the timer pings on my watch where I can accept it. There are multiple steps in this user story that a PWA currently struggles with, including:
These are all artificial problems created by Apple, though. The first three are all doable on Android PWAs, and you can do everything with a TWA in the Play Store.
I don’t disagree, although I think these reasons do mean that it’s far too early to say “App stores are dying” as in the post I was replying to - at least in Apple’s case they are still central, and even seem to be becoming more core with deeper integration into MacOS.
Also, in this context, a TWA isn’t useful as the post is about avoiding an App Store / central control using PWA.
GitHub has been expending its services, diverging from its original intent (e.g. remote visual studio code).
I disagree. I think providing that a way to distribute applications through GitHub, with builds certified as coming from the original authors, would be beneficial.
Agreed, I doubt GitHub will do this but you know what, anyone could start an App Store linked to GitHub (or GitX, or all of them, doesn't matter).
This has been tried in the past - Freshmeat, SourceForge, but that was a different era and also none of them tried to upgrade and modernize. So now there seems to be a niche opening for this in 2021.
Make an App Store platform everyone would love to be on. Get developers on board by giving them first 2 years for free, then a moderate membership fee. Take a reasonable cut from IAP's against providing customer support for the payments/chargebacks/fraud. Just make it awesome, reliable and fair.
I'm not convinced by any of the arguments the author points out which would actually address the problem of App Stores.
Essentially they are arguing for Github (Microsoft) to host and have an App Store on their platform and control it because they listen to their users, which is quite frankly a very poor reason.
Cydia and F-Droid packages are already 'App Stores' which you can install apps via pressing 'Add to Cydia' or 'Add to F-Droid' buttons on the publisher's website. You're free to add whatever app and install whatever app you want without Apple / Google stopping you, and its decentralised.
The same has been said for desktop apps (Native or Electron), which have been hosted on the publisher's websites for years, without the need of an App Store. I can imagine an 'App Store' equivalent for Desktop which works like Cydia and F-Droid which allows users to discover and install an app with a simple deep-link into the App Store. Linux has this already, equivalents for Windows and macOS are possible but it should not come from GitHub.
The above approaches are already there and are completely decentralised. Unlike the author who is going for another centralised App Store in the hands of GitHub / Microsoft (again).
The debacle IMO was all the folks who thought GH taking down youtube-dl was newsworthy at all in the first place. The infantile dependency is the problem, not the lack of yet another gatekeeper.
> I trust [MS] more than Apple and Google.
Thank you for the LOL. Look, VSCode is nice but don't be so naive.
Anyone can start an "app store", but can they make money at it? If MS thought they could make money running an app store would they hesitate? (Also, they already have an app store.)
> Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle.
I wouldn't say they were "awesome" during the youtube-dl stuff. They were slow to respond and non-transparent about what was happening behind the scenes.
Also, user's have been calling for GitHub to terminate their contract with ICE for a long time now[0] to no avail.
GitHub is better than most, no doubt, when it comes to "listen[ing] to their users" but they still have a ways to go.
If there is stance to be made, it should be principled.
Today it's just companies reacting to any specific issue internet mob in social media has. They ban specific people or organizations based on mob activity.
> They already host source code of millions of apps. Release integration should be trivial to implement.
So that it too can become an Apple / Google App Store where it can also control which apps, repositories are allowed or not? Essentially you're moving to another centralised platform, but the reason is because they 'listen to their users'? No thanks and no deal.
Hosting an app repository on your own website is fine and already decentralised. So far, Cydia and F-Droid are doing it right with being a potential alternative App Store.
I'm not sure what my point is here exactly, but: debian has had an "app store" for 20+ years that works brilliantly, can be trusted not to fuck with or spy on you, has never pulled youtube-dl/nmap/etc (as far as I know), (while also being naturally free of forum software for white supremacists (bonus!))
You're being quite selective here, sure the Debian way has it's positives but let's not pretend that model is free of problems -- there's been plenty of software that has been removed or is not allowed in Debian, and once you want a newer version of something that isn't in there then getting what you want can be difficult if you're not an expert, etc.
Debian's software repo is fantastic but has a deliberately high barrier to entry and chooses stability above all else.
Hosting your own apt repo isn't as difficult as it looks (all you need is a static file server) so it's a nice way to host your software if you have a collection of it.
I am totally behind that. The Ethos of the platform and the visibility it has are priming it for acceptance and its own market. When Open Source crystallizes around it, this could be the spark to break the duopoly of the mobile platforms (by framing a hypothetical future alternative), AND provide Desktop OS's an Ethos-First platform for releases, where the developers would want to be on their best behavior from the get-go.
I have a question regarding the moderation needs of stores: why exactly do we need stores for mobile devices, whereas we don't have any store or moderation for installing application on computers, or visiting websites?
Except various edge cases, you can technically visit any website that is served from any server, or you can install any application that has the correct binaries for your platform. What makes mobile devices different in this regard?
A walled garden is a plus for most consumers. Especially non-technical consumers who want to download something and be sure it's not spyware that will brick their phone. If you want to be able to install anything you can buy a pinephone but I can't imagine it would be fun to install anything on a pinephone.
Apple offers a walled garden as an offering to i-device users. Other companies try to mimic Apple's success. Mobile devices simply do not have the same "must be able to install anything" requirements that a standard computer has.
> I can't imagine it would be fun to install anything on a pinephone.
It's actually fun to do "apk add audacity" (yeah, there's also multiple gui frontends...) and have it installed and working as well as on desktop. OK, that one uses a traditional desktop interface, but it is still usable. Plug it into a docking station and use a mouse and keyboard + screen if you prefer.
Okay, that's not really sideloading, especially as each distro has its packaging format. You can use flatpaks for this (and they are sandboxes), some CIs provide builds as flatpaks (KDE does this).
One issue is that Linux executables are still very much architecture-dependent.
If you take off the linux hobbyist blinders you will see that having to type in "apk add audacity" and getting a mobile unusable interface is a non-starter for 99% of people. Compare that to the experience of typing in to a search bar that loads suggestions and gives results with pictures and ratings and descriptions.
I like the pinephone and am going to buy one myself but I'm buying it because of linux reasons, not because I actually think it will be a good daily driver.
Of course I have blinders on. Of course it isn't for 98% of people.
1. I did say it was usable, I am pretty sure most people could use it, although it wouldn't be a great pleasure (an personally I loathe these "addictive" mobile interfaces). One could get real work done with it.
2. I did say there was a gui for this. You don't have to type that if you don't want to. There are multiple gui front-ends with categories, descriptions, screenshots, ratings, etc. Courtesy of appstream metadata and packagekit, that both abstract away platform-specific package manager subtleties and provide "modern" store metadata.
3. This way a contrived example, there are simpler tools if all you want is record & play back.
4. "fun" is very subjective, that was part of my point.
Oh, and while we're on it, most distribution repositories are in fact walled gardens with a curated software selection (the audacity example above is part of it). That doesn't prevent you from sideloading whatever you want.
> I have a question regarding the moderation needs of stores
Moderation is orthogonal to stores.
We don't need stores. Some people might need filters. And multiple filters could exist for different audiences (children, grandmas who lack computer knowledge, etc.)
All fine and good but what we need first is an antitrust case against apple and google just like we had against Microsoft back in the day when internet explorer was pre-installed.
Just now we have a situation where you can't even install an alternative app store in one platform and the other one is crippled.
And don't tell me apple has a small market share or you can use another vendor. Back when Microsoft was being forced to open up it was as extremely easy to install another browser and they still had to go to court.
Branding does matter, but friction would be extremely rough.
Windows is ironically an extremely open system. All users are very used to doing what other platforms would call side loading. And all apps on windows have developed their own methods for receiving updates.
The Microsoft store for windows is pretty sad. Not because the interface sucks, at least not more so than google or apple ones, but because there isn't a real incentive for developers or users to use it.
Searching for a ssh client on the windows store shows ZERO free options, and all of them look worse than PuTTY. They are in the windows store strictly for visibility; which is a good use of an app store. But without the major players who don't need the limited visibility of that store, they users won't think to look there for their needs as well.
If Microsoft rebranded their app store the Github app store, Or made some easy pipeline for github actions to publish to their store; there would be a fair amount of people yelling "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" as well as fearing that microsoft is using the good will of GitHub to get to a similar world of the closed gardens of the others.
Lastly, Microsoft has not done so well in the mobile phone markets. Creating an android store similar to F-Droid would be a hard sell and limited appeal. Google very likely won't let you install the windows app store from the google app store. Apple will never allow a competitor on their platform _at all_ unless legally required.
I have plans to put my Windows apps in the Microsoft store, because I have heard it is cheaper than getting a code signing certificate which would be renewed yearly
But I switched to Linux, so I could not use any of the Microsoft tooling. Unless the store deployment can run on WINE?
> but because there isn't a real incentive for developers or users to use it
Not true. It solves app distribution, install, and updates. We used it for an education app a couple of years ago and it was great.
Before that we used Electron with Squirrel and it was horrible for our users. For some reason the app wasn't installed in the start menu and if they deleted the desktop shortcut it was impossible for them to find it again.
Sidebar: It's incredible that Microsoft itself now uses Electron with Squirrel for apps like GitHub Desktop and Microsoft Teams: It violates every notion of how Windows apps are supposed to be installed, wrecks havoc with enterprise application security policies, and is just the sort of aggressively irritating silent updating garbage that makes Microsoft's primary users, businesses, irritated as heck.
Github desktop and microsoft teams are meant to be cross platform, not windows only.
Teams is a competitor of Slack, so going windows only would be stupid.
And among all other options, right now using electron is the most popular for cross platform apps. moreover, it also allows teams to have a single version for web and desktop
Sure, but the way the installer works has a lot in common with how malware works on Windows machines: Most IT protections are going to block it, so making Teams work in the workplace requires poking a lot of security holes.
They could have simply used a different shell for Windows. Heck, they could have simply used Electron without Squirrel and distribute it through the Windows store.
We need multiple app stores with legislation on providing access and default searches, much in the same way EU will require devices to allow users to select default search etc..
A good amount of competition will help solve a lot of problems, and very strongly highlight the ant-competitive practices inherent in these value chain verticalizations.
I respect Google wants to form a Union to influence who can and cannot be on YouTube, at the same time, I want absolutely nothing to do with some foreign special interest group dictating content to me, so let's have some choice, thanks.
> They already host source code of millions of apps. Release integration should be trivial to implement.
Release integration is trivial for anyone. It's the easiest and most irrelevant part of the app stores.
> Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle.
And controversial on others, like shutting down Popcorn Time's repository. As any other, they'll listen if there's enough outcry.
> Backed by Microsoft. Microsoft has been playing good by the developers for years now. I trust them more than Apple and Google.
This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day. In fact, managing an important app store is exactly one way to re-(un)-balance this relationship.
> They could finally give the desktop the app store it deserves
Microsoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.
> This is a minor but users will be able to raise issues with developers directly instead writing comments over app pages which I think you would agree completely suck.
Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
I don't think there's a single angle that would paint this as a good idea. Phone manufacturers like Samsung are in a much much better position to try. And indeed they have been trying an failing.
If you think Microsoft wont turn their back and get on the ban/censorship train like any other company I believe that would be a mistake. They will have some "woke" employees and journalists grill the executives and then they will cave to mob rule just like the rest.
The first thing would be for someone to actually define "woke", as opposed to slinging it around as a conveniently-nebulous catch-all to describe people they're opposed to (see also "liberal" and "conservative"). What is the woke manifesto?
If you have something to say, then please just say it without couching it behind vague terms and "you can connect the dots yourself" conspiratorial thinking.
The American right has spent the past 35 years inventing scary new names for the same nebulous concept of a Marxist horde threatening to prevent them from speaking honestly.
It’s been known as “political correctness”, “social justice warriors”, “wokeness” and certainly a bunch of other names. The fundamental premise doesn’t change because it’s rooted in some deeper fear.
Do you think that no one has ever unironically used "politically correct", "social justice warrior", or "woke" to describe themselves or their opinions?
I'm not saying that the response to it isn't rooted in some deeper fear, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon they are afraid of doesn't exist.
Of course it exists, but for decades it's been cast into a mold that pattern-matches a longstanding reactionary anxiety.
Just like "cosmopolitan" is a neutral/positive adjective by its dictionary definition, but has a very negative connotation in certain right-wing and/or anti-Semite circles.
My first exposure to the term "social justice" was several years ago, when a family member began working with local jails and businesses, personally visiting and establishing relationships with inmates, and working to help reduce recidivism by arranging jobs for former inmates. I have never heard the addendum "warrior" added as a self-description, and have only ever heard it applied as a term of mockery from the right.
> I have never heard the addendum "warrior" added as a self-description, and have only ever heard it applied as a term of mockery from the right.
I'm reluctant to name specific individuals, but there are people who embrace the "SJW" term for themselves. For example, the flair next to the username of this semi-famous developer[0] is a self-description that he is known for.[1]
Perhaps you could argue that he is being ironic, but it is a self-description and he certainly doesn't mean to mock people who identify that way.
Liberals believe in universality under the law, free speech, individualism, color-blindness, markets, equality of opportunity, rule of law.
The illiberal left, whatever you want to call them, are precisely the opposite. They believe in contextual application of the law, faction and outcomes-based speech tolerance, racial/gender/religious collectivism, and therefore racial consciousness, find markets to be inherently exploitative, determine equality/equity in accordance with population outcomes, and tailor systems around producing equitable collective outcomes, and believe in designing systems that are less principled in their means so much as they are pragmatic in pursuit of their ends.
As a liberal myself, I find this faction of the left (AOC/Robin Diangelo/Ibram X. Kendi/Ilhan Omar etc) to be the furthest political faction from my own.
The thesis of the illiberal left isn't that universality under the law shouldn't exist, the free speech shouldn't exist, that individualism shouldn't exist, that color-blindness shouldn't exist, that equality of opportunity shouldn't exist, or anything else.
The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen. But the goal of abandoning liberalism is not actually to abandon those things, but to actually really realize them.
The thesis is that our current systems are not principled either in their means or their ends.
And it is true. Free speech is proportional to your means to challenge threats to your livelihood. Rule of law, universality under the law, equality of opportunity, simply do not exist - depending mainly on your socio-economic status but also on other axes such as racial perception of the individual by society, and so on.
Equally, the thesis isn't that we shouldn't have color-blindness, simply that the current social and material reality makes this impossible. As a result of this, attempts/pretensions at color-blindness simply make the problem worse.
If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex. The exact same set of theories are applied to race, before racial abolition there must be a realization of the existence of racial identity (which is indeed the definition of race in the leftist sense - racial identity is completely orthogonal to traits and genetics, it is indeed a completely cultural and social phenomenon and process), then true racial equality, then essentially complete racial abolition.
Systems that actually provide real equality of opportunity will always provide actually equitable collective outcomes on the average.
Equally, the leftist opposition is not to markets themselves. The leftist opposition is to our current set of property relations and to the relationships of productions. Attempts to change those when the time is not opportune have been disastrous, so the aim is to compensate and slowly work towards actually fixing them using state intervention that ancillary limit the freedom of the free market. But there is no inherent opposition to markets at all.
This worldview is only a few decades younger than classical liberalism itself, and started with the disappointed third estate of the French Revolution. Put simply, the thesis is that classical liberalism failed to achieve its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that making good on those promises requires more careful and less idealistic theories of society and social change than the idealist ones of classical liberalism.
I just thought you would enjoy not arguing against strawmen.
Well articulated and a good example of why one ought to be able to cleanly argue both sides of an argument if one expects to be taken seriously.
I would take issue with your first point: many of those who ascribe to these theories believe that the principles you mention like free speech are inherently platonic: they cannot be achieved in any meaningful sense, regardless of what is done, due to the inherent nature of human beings. The measures you refer to often do not have the goal of bringing about justice through mechanisms other than coercion of society against its inherent nature (Ie, by force.) So I would argue that many abandon the goal of achieving them in the first place due to their unattainability. Ironically, honest liberals acknowledge the realities of the difficulty of ever attaining them in full - however the liberalist approach is that there is no other moral effort other than to try to close the gap as small as reality will permit, and that ultimately the method of steady, incremental progress towards attaining these things will in fact result in the best of all possible worlds.
I certainly agree that a lot of those ideals are platonic, though not at all. It's important to note that I'm only limiting myself to those arguments for the purposes of the argument.
I also agree that steady, incremental progress has a lot of value, and that there is probably a bit more improvement that is feasible within the liberal framework, which is why I'm glad to work with liberals on those.
The issue I have with the liberal perspective on this is that most of the imperfection (or gross deficiency, depending on the specific aspect) ultimately originates in economics, both socially and economically. The result of this is that (reluctantly) I had to recognize that these deficiencies are not solvable within the liberal framework, as it presupposes the economic and social relations that cause the issues. That said, I don't think that this change of framework shouldn't be done incrementally, if such a thing is at all possible.
On the moral side, though arguing morals of the internet quickly gets hairy, the leftist argument (this one I consider incomplete), is that there is quite some absurdity in claiming that using coercion for the goal of changing social relations in a way that will clearly improve society, since liberal society itself is ultimately based on massive amounts of coercion, which is reproduced by the perpetuation of the current framework.
I'd also take issue with the idea that society has an inherent nature which social change butts against. Indeed, not only are the mechanisms for social change, coercive as they may be, themselves a part of society and not extrinsic to it, but there is very little in the way of inherent nature as far as society is concerned, as society itself has seen almost total change in a great many ways as the relationships between the self, the social, and the material changed.
That said, I certainly understand your position, and my goal wasn't really to attempt to debate which viewpoint is right - not only is it that I cannot fully do them justice, but the nuances of of each one of our contentions I think merit a full thread or more by themselves. I just think a lot of liberals do not really understand the illiberal left at all. I think the peak of this was the Peterson vs Zizek debate, where Peterson read the Communist Manifesto once, and then operated in idées reçues for the actual positions of the illiberal left, in the process completely missing the point and leading to a non-debate.
I don't understand how I was arguing with a strawman, when your entire argument is explaining WHY the left is illiberal. I said that the illiberal left differs from liberals in that they don't, for example, find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. You go on to explain why the illiberal left doesn't find color-blindness to be a reasonable strategy for eliminating racism. No strawmanning was done, nor was a moral judgment.
To address some of your points. You say
> The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen
Liberalism doesn't make a claim regarding whether or not things exist or not. It is a fixed compass of procedural principles. Completely consistent of means, independent of ends, and independent of the state of things. You can't say that "free speech doesn't exist in the real world," when free speech is a procedural description of the way the system should run. If there is a failure of free speech to be applied unilaterally, that isn't a failure of liberalism, so much as an implementation error, and a failure to actually run the system as described. Your argument is like saying that "habeas corpus doesn't exist because the Japanese were interned in WW2." Habeas corpus is a procedural description of a process. What happened in WW2 wasn't habeas corpus not existing, but an implementation failure where habeas corpus was not implemented.
Much of the liberal ethos was present in the country since the get-go, and the failures of the country were actually failures of implementation. How can you have slaves, how can you treat people differently in accordance with their race, how can women not vote, in a country whose espoused ethics describe systems that would in no way tolerate these failings? The strongest leaps forward in progress have come from making the claim "this is what the liberal ethos describes, and this is how you're failing at it." MLK or the suffragettes are making the case that they're being denied their ability to act as individual actors, being denied equality under the law.
Now, compare this to the modern left.
> If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex.
You have described the exact opposite of what the modern left is. In the 60s-00s, the movement regarding gender equality was primarily what I would have described as a liberal movement. One that is hyper focused on individualism, and asserting that identity could exist as independently from sex or race as one wanted. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, that is as valid an expression of what it means to be a female as any other variant. This is an anti-collective, purely individualistic position, and is spot on with the liberal assertions of individualism and (gender)-blindness.
The modern leftist position is a complete inversion of this. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, are you sure you're not a boy? Your gender presentation is rather male, you must at least be non-binary? Do you see how this is a complete inversion? It goes back to making the assertion that these gender expressions are actually fundamentally to be associated with fixed collectives. I find it to be a much more powerful expression for a man to have long hair, wear dresses and makeup, love whoever they want to love, and say "I'm a man, and this is what being a man means to me." I don't take any issue with that same person asserting that they're a woman, I just think,...
I'll define it to be anyone who either explicitly or implicitly buys into the core elements of the doctrine slash religion of pseudo-postmodern Theory.
One of the common patterns of this is the assumption that guilt-by-extra-vague-association (such as having a Parler account) or silence-is-complicity are reasonable ways to motivate extra-judicial justice against people, such as getting them fired, as was done here. These are fundamentally illiberal philosophies, both in their content and their explicit rejection of liberalism as a force for good in society.
I wasn't couching what I was saying in any way. I was saying that if you do not think the kinds of behavior we are seeing where people's lives are being ruined by mob justice are anything other than "bogeymen", you ought to write down where the line is for you to honestly reconsider your position. In any situation where society slips slowly into madness, a lack of self-recognition where ones breaking points are contributes greatly to that slide.
> if you do not think the kinds of behavior we are seeing where people's lives are being ruined by mob justice are anything other than "bogeymen"
That's not how I took their response at all. I believe they were specifically picking up your derogatory use of the term "woke". If you meant "illiberal", why not use that term? It's far less ambiguous and less loaded.
Check the author of the comment you are referring to, it's not me. For what it's worth, I do not use the term "woke" for the reason you mentioned, but if someone asks what definition I would apply to it if I had to (as I was here) what I wrote is my answer.
Oh no, poor literary agent caught posting on Gab, a far right white supremacist website, and losing her job. Thoughts and prayers.
More seriously if you think that's a problem IMO the solution is to ask for better employee protection laws so that people can't be fired at will. This is not a free speech problem IMO, it's a worker right issue.
And if it turns out that her contract did mention that she shouldn't publicly engage in something that would damage the company's image or something of the sort, well, that's just the way it works really.
Gab isn't a far right white supremacist website. It's just right wing Twitter. I don't understand where all this hyperbole comes from but it's a perfect example of the low-information individuals we have in society today.
The populist right has been systemically purged from Twitter. It's not that Twitter is left wing but they ban right wing thought, leading it to be a slanted echo-chamber. Gab is definitely right wing Twitter.
I've seen equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
> equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
Why is that "whacky"? There were Russian ads.[1] They obviously intended to affect the election result (because why bother otherwise). Whether or not they were actually successful in affecting the election is unknowable. But it's not flat-earther-whacky to think they succeeded.
The right is saying the same about election fraud. Neither have any basis in reality beyond circumstancial evidence. Neither should dominate the conversation so heavily and yet... here we are.
Both left and right have it's stupid moments, if you can't see that it's you with the bias, not me.
I don't think you understand what "circumstantial evidence" is.
I'm aware I'm biased, but in this case the facts are in plain sight for Russian ads. A Republican authored that report. You may think yourself unbiased by saying "both sides are the same" but both sides are in fact not the same at all.
The "right" may say the same about "election fraud" but saying is not the same as having a well-sourced report, and federal investigation that netted multiple indictments and convictions.
Just about anyone who disagrees with the left is classed as [White Supremacist/Nazi] these days. And it's not just whites. [Whiteness] is a term being applied to people of colour too when they don't fall in line with the re-education program. Orwellian doesn't even begin to describe the nonsense afoot today.
The actual posts I saw were on Parler, and she wasn't posting anything even remotely connected to white supremacy, just normal things you would post on Twitter. She was banned for having an account, as best I can tell. This shouldn't surprise anyone. (And your comment obviously provides further evidence for why this shouldn't surprise anyone.)
I think it is, and it's also a useful conversational marker.
As soon as someone starts complaining about "woke" and "SJWs" and "cancel culture" and so on, I know I can just switch off and disengage, as anything they have to say on the topic will be some reactionary bullshit they're parroting at me.
The funny thing about these "reasons" the article writes, is that it does not give any reason why GitHub would want to create such an app store. Most the reasons stated are basically what we will supposedly benefit. There is literally no reason from GitHub's point of view why they would be interested in creating such a product to begin with.
Of course, there might be reasons form Microsoft to create an alternative to the App Stores say for a gaming marketplace etc. But specifically for GitHub I cannot see why they would be interested in the overhead.
It would be interesting for GitHub because they have a large developer community who push to these app stores already, so they have the dev audience, just not the consumer.
They charge said developers a few dollars a month per seat. GitHub could somehow instead be taking a 0%-20% cut topline revenue from some of the apps they host.
Lots of work to make that happen the upside might make it worth while.
It's a large pile of open source software. It's able to be redistributed freely, by design. Everyone is in the position to take advantage of the catalog, if they can somehow solve the demand side -- that's what the entire problem of a store is about. F-Droid has been trying for years!
Companies host their private code in private repos.
I’m not saying it’s the best thing for GitHub to do, but...
Let’s say 15% of Android top 1000 apps are sitting in private repos on GitHub. With their build tools GitHub make it possible to automatically push builds to this imaginary store, they offer devs 50% discount on whatever cut google take if on the play store.
You're right, but you don't need to be GitHub for that. Any dev can create an app that integrates with GH, or any other source control service for that matter.
GitHub is no longer just a source code management company. They've started their horizontal integration, and are firmly in the more general "Developer Tools" category. This would be another addition to their horizontal integration, and increasing the amount of the development pipeline they're involved in.
The specific advantage is that it makes switching providers really hard. You develop in Atom, store the code in GitHub, use GitHub Actions for CI/CD (if that's viable, I'm not super familiar with the product), use GitHub to manage the released artifacts, and publish them to GitHub's app store.
That makes it really appealing to buy because you don't have to talk to 7 different vendors and duct tape their solutions together with Python scripts. You talk to 1 vendor, who gives you all the pieces, and the pieces are already able to communicate natively.
It makes it really appealing to sell because once you buy in, it's really hard to get back out. Imagine trying to replace all of those components, and the developer time you lose as people get used to the new systems and how they all work together. Bonus points if you can only publish to the GitHub app store from GitHub installations. GitLab can do a lot of those things, but they don't have an app store.
As others pointed out though, it would compete with Microsoft's existing app store. I would not be terribly surprised to see some kind of integration between GitHub and MS's app store, or Azure and their app store though.
> This is a minor but users will be able to raise issues
I don't think people understand what an average (and below average) cell phone user is like. Just read some of the App store reviews (fraction of the people that use apps actually write reviews).
This pipe-dreaming would come crashing down from being a minor issue to major, the wrath of an average user is insane.
None of the arguments make their suggestion(s) a good idea. It solves none of the problems of the App Store as it just offloads the work onto Github (Microsoft) who can also de-platform who ever they want on their centralised App Store.
It would be business as usual under a different Big Tech name.
>This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day. In fact, managing an important app store is exactly one way to re-(un)-balance this relationship.
I agree. Sorting huge, multinational, publicly traded companies in friends and enemies list is so obviously bogus and immature that it baffles me that this is so prevalent.
Microsoft is not your enemy. It's not your friend (unless you're one of the shareholders). It's profit driven and amoral. They'll always line up with whatever they believe will maximize profits because that their entire reason for existing.
Apparently Microsoft decided that being more FLOSS friendly (after decades of trying to annihilate these projects, lest we forget) because they decided that it would favor them in the long run.
If they ever decide that they stand to make more profit by throwing the whole github ethos under the bus they will. A few people will make strongly worded blog posts that will reach the top of HN. A few employees might even quit and loudly slap the door on the way out. Then probably nothing will happen.
This really is a generational divide, those of US that were around for the 90's and early 00's Microsoft crap still have a bad taste for the "new Microsoft" that claims to love FLOSS (while still showing many signs of EEE.. )
During that time Google was very friendly to FLOSS, and open protocols (remember when GChat was just a XMPP client)
Today MS and Google seems to have flipped, Google now is fully embracing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, where MS seems to be attempting to wind that back though with mixed success
Yeah, LSP may be turning out to be a good example of Microsoft going back to EEE; with a twist, though: rather than embracing a pre-existing standard, they're proposing a new one
Yeah, I was there. I have a long view and cynicism that m$ has retreated to the Embrace phase. To vastly oversimplify their governance, they're a new CEO away from Extend and Extinguish.
Lately, I love what they've been doing. Even github -- there have been disappointments, for sure, but nothing like the egregious misbehavior in the bad old days. But given their history; given Google's "do no evil" bait&switch... I don't want to hand them more power.
It'd be cool if an interested third party could build out an app store that automatically sources from github (and its competitors), though.
Yeah, I "use" fdroid. Usually that means searching for apps, finding their download links broken, and then finding the apk on a couple skeezy-looking apk download pages and checking that they checksum the same (verifying, at best, that the skeezy sites have the same possibly hacked apk... ick)
I have developed a rekindled hatred for M$ in the past few weeks trying to install firefox on a fresh installation of windows 10. I counted 5 seperate scare tactics employed by M$ to keep you using Edge. I thought they were successfully sued for monopolistically coupling Internet Explorer to Windows and had a flow in their installation menu's for installing competing browsers. I was surprised that this is now totally missing!
From what I could see it was also difficult to switch the office suite. My OEM installed trial versions of word, excel, etc. which were set to be opened by default on all related file extensions. Switching to libreoffice was a PITA, I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
Since I abandoned Windows for Linux, my opinion of Microsoft has improved dramatically. Windows has to be one of their worst, if not their worst product. GitHub and Azure are both quite good, and Office is at least OK. All their Android apps and Android integration are excellent. The new Xbox and related services are even quite good. Just every time I'm forced to use Windows (especially at work where I can't change any aspect of it), I'm reminded of why I hated Microsoft so much.
The thing to experience here, is to try using Google sites with Edge: Microsoft has definitely been pushing people to use Edge, but it pales in comparison to how heavily Google abuses their web properties to shove Chrome down peoples' throats.
Back when I used Gmail, I'd open my email and get not one, but TWO separate things, one a popup box, and one a top bar, telling me I should switch to Chrome, and dismissing it never stuck. It'd come back in a week or so. Even once Edge started running on Chrome code, Google stepped up writing new tricks to claim that Edge was "less secure" because it didn't direct telemetry straight to Google servers.
Google's underhanded push with Chrome has hurt everyone, and unfortunately, Microsoft probably can't "target just Chrome" in retaliating against such messaging, so Firefox gets hit too.
Don't forget about the shady and underhanded ways to prevent you from making a local account for a new installation of Windows. The first screen you see asks for a WiFi password, and I assume that it is going to start downloading updates in the background. Instead, it prompts you to enter an email address for a Microsoft account. The "Learn More" button says that you can make an offline account later, but right now they'd really like to have your personal information before letting you continue.
The only way to actually make a local account is to either (a) refuse to connect to WiFi until after an account is made or (b) disconnect the router while it is trying to talk to Microsoft. Option (a) is inaccessible by the time you realize that there is a problem, and option (b) is ridiculous and needs to be found on third-party suggestions. All so that Microsoft can pull in another email address.
Oh yes! I am just glad I knew about this behaviour beforehand and didn't let the laptop connect to my WiFi. My dad would've fallen into this trap _for sure_.
Windows 10 installation has become a maze which only the really savvy can escape with their privacy somewhat in tact.
This was on a home edition, pre installed on a new Lenovo laptop. Looking it up, this happens on all Home versions, but hasn't yet spread to Professional.
That's terrible and all, but you can't even really install a different browser on your phone. They're either Safari wrappers or Chrome wrappers (even Firefox).
They're all Safari wrappers on iOS because Apple deems it so. Android has no such requirements and thus when you install Firefox you're actually running Firefox.
Yes, I agree. To fail to register as the default program for all the extensions you support, ideally optionally, is surely the fault of the installer not the os?
There are perhaps better anecdotes for reasons to dislike windows...
Im not sure if libreoffice is fully to blame, I don't think it is possible for applications to _change_ the default app directly themselves, they now need to link to the windows settings screen to have the user manually do it. It is a fair point that libreoffice currently fails to do even this.
These are still registry entries and are still located in the same part of the registry and still with the same way. This hasn't changed. What's changed is registering applications to show up for the new UI is a huge pain requiring multiple registry keys, however simply setting the opening application for a given filetype/protocol is quite easy: either open a .reg file with reg.exe (pops up a code window) or regedit,exe (pops up a prompt), or add the entry programmatically (silent).
Personally, I'm still annoyed that removed the File Types settings in Windows 7(?), though some of them have made their way back with the new settings.
>>I have developed a rekindled hatred for M$ in the past few weeks trying to install firefox on a fresh installation of windows 10.
Install a Package Manager like Chocolety [1], AppGet [2] or the new "Official" one WinGet
>>I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
Yea MS has tried to bork this, but in the "Default Apps" settings page of the new "Settings" Application, there is a link called "Set Defaults by App" that makes it MUCH easier than what you did which was "Choose Default Apps by File Type"
Personally I do not look at companies for being nice, sweet, good to the world or whatever other bullshit any company will try to convince you to believe.
Do you really believe Microsoft is changing their tactics because they want to?
They needed to change.
Their goal which has always been Platform, around 12 years ago they realized it had to be open open towards everything else than Windows only. Otherwise they would be seriously under pressure.
Why do you think Azure is so popular with other platforms too, other than ms tech?
Microsoft is really really good at setting and reaching goals. They excel at it. And believe you me, that their goal is not to approve and support open source because they shifted their mindset towards it - it's because they had to - and they will make money doing it.
These statements about companies, being kind towards this or that, has to be read carefully. They are savages in the end and will do pretty much anything to win.
It's repeated very often that companies maximize shareholder value, but that's not really true. Companies follow the personal interests of their management and employees, in proportion to their power within the institution, which sometimes involves shareholder value.
Ye. The belief in the "invisible hand" is strong. Boards and executives are not more rational than employees in general. Why would they not do things because they e.g. feel good about it or want revenge - like they were some super human well oiled machine.
Furthermore (and I think this is the strongest evidence), if companies were really "amoral impersonal shareholder value maximizers," enterprise sales would consist of leaving a box outside their front door and billing them a day later. The fact that enterprise sales is the exact opposite of that, opposed to it in every form, is very strong evidence against the robot-corporate way of looking at it. Of the many techniques for getting corporations to do things, as practiced by professional influencers of corporate choices, all begin and end with relationships. Not relationships with the company; relationships with its members.
In my personal and admittedly startup-prevalent experience with boards, I definitely think they operate more emotionally than most might think. Even companies I’ve worked with in the double to triple digit millions of worth function on far more emotional and interpersonal levels than most might think. Sure, money is the major motivator, but it’s all a machine driven by humans that are gut-based emotion bags.
And here I though it's an obvious point. Board and executives are not more rational than employees in general, but are also as much - if not more - constrained in their actions. They can't just do whatever they want, not if they want to keep their jobs and high salaries, or hold any similar jobs in the future. The part where a company becomes an amoral profit maximizer is a combination of:
- Interests of the shareholders and other stakeholders, who most likely cannot agree on most of their goals, but they will agree on "money = good";
- Competitors who wait for the company to make a mistake they can exploit to get ahead, or possibly kill the company
Combined, these forces all but ensure the company has no choice but to be a amoral profit maximizer, or die.
A different analogy, that doubles down on "corporation is essentially an AI" view, but may make it easier to explain the main point: if you apply Maslow's pyramid to companies, most of them do not have their Physiological and Safety levels met. They operate in survival mode. Rarely, a company "feels" secure enough to ponder long-term visions or some ideals that aren't directly survival-related.
How and why? I don't get the point about salesmen here.
Companies are not perfect optimizers. Arguably not even that strong. If someone in Purchasing is willing to reward their buddy instead of picking the best vendor for the job, well, that happens. It's noise. Doesn't change the overall behavior of the company. And it only happens within limits - do it too much, and the person in Purchasing will find themselves fired, maybe even charged with a crime. If they're too good, maybe they can kill their own company - much like a sickness can kill a human. Other companies will then be more vigilant.
Also worth noting that companies strive to improve their process and develop various means of ensuring and enforcing accountability - this, in essence, is trying to reduce the "noise" of individual humans within the larger AI of the company.
People who professionally influence companies, i.e. those whose job it is to understand corporate decision-making, focus almost exclusively on the dynamics of personal relationships. Salesmen, B2B marketers and even activists all use human behavior as the foundation of their techniques. This thing about corporations being monolithic being-like entities is a "theory without a practice;" we can look to the people who empirically deal with corporations to see that they do not find it useful to think that way.
Given higher-ups are either invested to some extent, or otherwise feel their prospects are aligned with the stock price because the investors will have them out if it doesn't do well enough, so I'd say the considerations always involve shareholder value. It might not be the only factor, and sometimes other factors win out, but it is always a factor.
But there are strong incentive structures in place that introduce a correlation between the interests of these individuals and the company's success at driving up share price or even making money. It's not as straightforward as that in reality, but a noisy profit/shareprice maximizing agent is not the worst approximation of a corporation you could come up with.
Business is amoral; the system is amoral. But every player in the system must choose for every action whether to do that action or not. The actions they choose will either conform to the morals or they will not, so in the end just like the individual people that comprise them, companies are (mostly) either good or bad. There’s nothing that says a company, even a publicly-traded one, must not exist for anything but profit.
A company is not a static entity and its "morals" will change must faster than those of an individual. Moreover nothing says that the management of a company must act based on their innate morals. Lying for personal benefit is a perfectly valid human trait. Humans are also very good at justifying anything we do that benefits us as aligning with our moral compass. So in the end a company must be assumed to have no moral compass in the future even if it has one now. Giving a company power now based on its moral compass will just mean it has power to abuse in the future when its moral compass changes.
Microsoft and Google being recent examples of companies shifting their moral compass fairly quickly.
> I agree. Sorting huge, multinational, publicly traded companies in friends and enemies list is so obviously bogus and immature that it baffles me that this is so prevalent.
If that's true, then why do brands exist?
For most companies, the best way to drive profit is to build a long term relationship of trust with their customers and suppliers.
Edit: this doesn't mean I'm ready to join the Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon fan club, but I can see that some companies regularly behave better than others, and I'm happy to act on that reputation. Take Oracle, for example.
I feel like the trouble with this line of thinking re large consumer-facing companies is that many of their loyalty relationships are in conflict with each other, so even when they're acting in the interests of preserving trust with one group, they're undermining the trust of another.
When Github restored youtube-dl, they increased user trust while undermining media industry trust. When they pulled popcorntime, they did the reverse.
In each case, they were presumably acting rationally to preserve their relationships as best as they could. But whether or not that benefits you as an individual is more or less a toss of a coin.
> I can see that some companies regularly behave better than others, and I'm happy to act on that reputation
This is a bogus line of thinking. For example, Apple have a very strong stance on privacy compared to FB and Google.
Does this mean they are more moral or trustworthy when it comes to privacy, or that you should trust them to remain focussed on privacy in the future?
Not at all! Their focus on privacy is a smart business model that they use to differentiate themselves from the competition. As soon as it stops being a smart model, or a better model presents itself, under the bus their focus on privacy will go. Apple being focussed on privacy right now should not be taken as them having a good reputation. They do not care about your privacy. They care about you buying their products. The same applies to all apparent "good" or "moral" behavior of any large company. It's not genuine morality, they don't care about the benefits to you or society at large. They just want you to generate money for them.
By all means, choose products from a company whose presented morality currently aligns with yours. But don't believe that morality is genuine, and don't get hooked on that company. Instead use them, just as they are using you, for as long as it benefits you, then dump them in a second when they inevitably change... Just as they would do to you.
Extending your line of reasoning, that would imply not just that we shouldn't fall in love with Apple, but additionally that we shouldn't avoid companies with bad reputations. Which seems bonkers to me?
Taking my Oracle example, I'm definitely never going to recommend my company adopts Oracle. Given their historical behaviour, it's just too much risk!
This position that all companies are equally amoral seems 1. blind to reality and 2. to be throwing away useful information.
The likely actions of a company are embedded in their culture, their structure, the people who choose to work there, and the personalities of their leadership. That can all change, but you have the ability to observe that change and punish companies which violate your trust.
>It's profit driven and amoral. They'll always line up with whatever they believe will maximize profits because that their entire reason for existing.
That's both unfair, and quite frankly lets companies like Boeing off the hook. Executives get paid egregious amounts of money to set the direction of companies. Yes, some do focus solely on profit and it's generally obvious when they do. Some focus on making customers happy at nearly all costs. And there is everything in between. Of course management at all those companies believe their approach will make the company money, but plenty aren't solely focused on maximizing profits, I'd argue MS included.
>> hone manufacturers like Samsung are in a much much better position to try. And indeed they have been trying an failing.
Samsung is bothering me. I have an S8 and they want to replace all the standard Google apps - including the basic text messageing one - with Samsung equivalents.
It's not clear why and I haven't gone looking. It feels like they're just trying to displace Google and be another company reading my messages and monitoring my activity. I figure I don't need another one of those in my life. If their intent is to help me by offering privacy respecting alternatives they have not done so. I'm also completely unaware of any app-store Samsung may have beyond a place for them to push their versions of these apps.
Am I wrong? Should I be looking closer at what Samsung has to offer?
Samsung isn't much better than Google on the privacy side. They're just replacing all the standard apps to make them more in line with OneUI in terms of UX.
But things like Samsung health send data home too unfortunately.
They are stepping back from cloud services a bit now and letting Microsoft step in, also not privacy driven but more financial I think.
Samsung security, privacy and general software qualify are all a joke as far as I can tell and it’s amusing anyone would put them in even the same ballpark as Google.
Dog bites man is not news, and neither are most of the Samsung software travesties ranging from software supply chain debacles to TV spying to data breaches.
Nobody even cares in the tech community because no one expects anything of them.
We were just talking about privacy, in that sense I think Samsung is roughly at the same level (considering it can't get much worse than Google :) ).
I think Google is doing a good job with their Pixel phones indeed in terms of security, though they need longer support IMO. Samsung seems to just call everything 'knox' but not really specify what exactly they're doing. So from a security point of view I agree.
> considering it can't get much worse than Google :)
What? It can get way worse than Google. For all the privacy invasive things that Google does it’s one of the least bad. Unlike most companies that collect data it doesn’t directly sell user data, and it has a good history of avoiding security vulnerabilities that leak data.
Avoiding vulnerabilities that leak data to others except themselves you mean :)
I suppose the Chinese state and the apps they control like WeChat is worse in terms of what they do with the data (this social credit score etc). You're right. I was mainly thinking about the collection itself, not what is done with it.
What I mind mainly about Google is that they use it as payment for their services but don't provide any option to opt out and just pay with money. Though I suppose even if they did that at this stage, I wouldn't trust them.
After installing NoRoot Firewall on my phone, I discovered that every single Samsung app was phoning home: camera, gallery, contacts, bixby, health, messaging, etc. On the upside, I was able to remove 99% of the pre-installed apps without any special tools. The only one that refused to go was bixy (and no way to reprogram the dedicated button), but at least it can be "disabled" and denied all permissions via Android's app manager.
> On the upside, I was able to remove 99% of the pre-installed apps without any special tools.
I wish I could do this. I have 32 GB space on my phone. Half of it is wasted on pre-installed junk I cannot delete because "it came with the phone". This involves games, or something like "Booking.com", and so forth.
> Samsung isn't much better than Google on the privacy side.
Samsung is vastly worse. Consider off the bat that South Korea has wildly different (read ‘permissive and lax’) laws about police and government access to stored data.
Oems for android apps often have their own contacts, dialer, calendar, and home apps. Usually this is to provide a differentiated experience, not to surveil you. Some are very good... Even better than the stock android experience. Others are terrible. Privacy is all over the board (except that most are using your Google account for storage so Google is almost always there). The vendor app stores often have device optimized apps and sometimes have better pricing. An example would be adding support for the curved edge on many Samsung devices...
> Microsoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.
There has never been any indication that Microsoft would unilaterally shut down Windows software. If fact they are uniquely open in terms of modern proprietary OS's.
>> Microsoft has been playing good by the developers for years now. I trust them more than Apple and Google.
> This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day.
And the way they run a store is consistently horrible that it feels impossible to make worse. Full of horror stories, bans and rejections, sometimes even random pick deletions since Xbox Live Indie Games days, to at least as recent as just few quarters ago.
There are reasons why people choose iOS, Android, .msi file download from GitHub and so on over Microsoft Store.
> Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
There's a more fundamental issue: GitHub issues are for developers to report bugs and file feature-requests, they aren't intended for user support, even if that's sometimes how they're used.
> Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
This honestly sounds like it could be a feature with the right automation. Devs are often separated from customers by multiple layers of "flappers" who's sole job is to triage, organize, and perform manual resolution of customer issues.
If your app is large enough to receive hundreds of issues a day, then it's likely there are entire teams of "flappers". What if that could be entirely automated such that customer complaints were grouped by pain point, and automatically ranked based on how many customers are affected and how severely they are affected?
This seems like an oddly practical problem to solve in 2021.
So far we have not been to find a way to automate this sort of triage unfortunately. Also, most developers I know are quite happy that there is someone between them and the customers.
>Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
Average user is less than poorly educated about technology. Their level of competence when raising a bug is simply pathetic, a lot of times. I manage an email server for a family, they write to me "email doesn't work", I check issue and respond "domain should be gmail.com not gmail,com" (notice the comma).
This reminded me how sqlite team was getting emails or calls at night, from some random people because another software was crashing. User went to "about/legal" and found license of SQLite, so obviously they decided to contact SQLite and complain on bad software. https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d/src/os.h#L52-...
Now imagine facebook api breaks backwards compatibility, so you get 1000 of new issues in a day with title "broken", "doesn't work", "shit is crahing so gave 1* fix it now I might review it later".
Microsoft tripped over themselves scrambling to make advertising revenue as fast as possible and stymied the development of their operating system to do so. They have turned the user of Windows into the product. They are pulling a Facebook/Google and the author has the audacity to say they trust Microsoft more than Apple? Give me a break.
> Microsoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.
Perhaps they could integrate github and winget/snap (for the linux side).
Like, here your Github release page, just one extra click and you can automatically publish to winget (for Windows) and to snap (for Linux).
The natural solution would seem to be building the github store and the microsoft store differently - Microsoft store could be the quality-controlled, guaranteed by microsoft space while github store could be more like an open bazaar.
I was thinking why we need an app store at all. It does make sense for security and discoverability. However maybe it makes sense to have multiple app stores. So you my phone I could have a Google one and Microsoft one and maybe a new company that specializes in this.
Not gonna happen. Anyone could start an App Store and use GH’s api’s to file issues with developers repos anyway. Microsoft owns App Center (formerly Hockey App) which allows apps to send diagnostics to devs for crashes and the like. I’d expect similar features for GH in the longer term future. But an App Store - prob not. Apple is particularly difficult to develop on and deploy to their store as it is. You can only deploy to test devices with custom policies (app center makes this easier) or jailbreak your device. There’s no way Apple will ever release their monopoly on their App Store. So you’d be looking at an android only App Store (plus windows for whatever that is worth)
I thought from reading the headline it was a genius idea, but I think after reflection there are at least two major barriers to this working:
1. There is no GitOS. So the target environment would be so variable and high friction that it's unclear to me how GitHub would manage clean builds and installation.
2. I'd say MOST repos aren't anywhere near ready to run. Making an automated binary/msi/apk/ pathway would almost certainly lead to broken packages for the majority of repos.
318 comments
[ 510 ms ] story [ 2141 ms ] threadBuilding app stores is hard. Moderating app stores is hard. Both are significantly different from running GitHub.
While I appreciate the author's intent here, this just doesn't feel like it was deeply thought out.
This could be a nice come back into the mobile sphere they lost out on. As a developer, I completely agree that Microsoft earned my trust over the years.
The pendulum has shifted, and it's swinging towards PWA.
Per Microsoft, Outlook is now a progressive web app.
App stores are dying - they're just going to take a bit to timeout.
Didn't Firefox recently announce they're discontinuing PWA features?
PWA is a set of modern web standards. "Supporting PWA" can mean many things but "Removing unfinished SSB" doesn't mean "Removing PWA".
It has for some things, and for others native is king. Native just delivers experiences that PWA can’t (yet).
To take a simple example - let’s consider a ‘timer app’. On iPhone I ask Siri to set me a timer for 5 minutes, it sets the timer and I walk away from my phone. 15 minutes the timer pings on my watch where I can accept it. There are multiple steps in this user story that a PWA currently struggles with, including:
* (Reliable) backgrounding
* Siri integration
* Notifications
* Apple Watch support
Also, in this context, a TWA isn’t useful as the post is about avoiding an App Store / central control using PWA.
I disagree. I think providing that a way to distribute applications through GitHub, with builds certified as coming from the original authors, would be beneficial.
This has been tried in the past - Freshmeat, SourceForge, but that was a different era and also none of them tried to upgrade and modernize. So now there seems to be a niche opening for this in 2021.
Make an App Store platform everyone would love to be on. Get developers on board by giving them first 2 years for free, then a moderate membership fee. Take a reasonable cut from IAP's against providing customer support for the payments/chargebacks/fraud. Just make it awesome, reliable and fair.
Essentially they are arguing for Github (Microsoft) to host and have an App Store on their platform and control it because they listen to their users, which is quite frankly a very poor reason.
Cydia and F-Droid packages are already 'App Stores' which you can install apps via pressing 'Add to Cydia' or 'Add to F-Droid' buttons on the publisher's website. You're free to add whatever app and install whatever app you want without Apple / Google stopping you, and its decentralised.
The same has been said for desktop apps (Native or Electron), which have been hosted on the publisher's websites for years, without the need of an App Store. I can imagine an 'App Store' equivalent for Desktop which works like Cydia and F-Droid which allows users to discover and install an app with a simple deep-link into the App Store. Linux has this already, equivalents for Windows and macOS are possible but it should not come from GitHub.
The above approaches are already there and are completely decentralised. Unlike the author who is going for another centralised App Store in the hands of GitHub / Microsoft (again).
Let's wait and see history repeating itself. I don't buy that and I will never forget.
The debacle IMO was all the folks who thought GH taking down youtube-dl was newsworthy at all in the first place. The infantile dependency is the problem, not the lack of yet another gatekeeper.
> I trust [MS] more than Apple and Google.
Thank you for the LOL. Look, VSCode is nice but don't be so naive.
Anyone can start an "app store", but can they make money at it? If MS thought they could make money running an app store would they hesitate? (Also, they already have an app store.)
I'm afraid all the reasons the author lists, just boils down to: 'GitHub (Microsoft) should host all our apps because they listen to their users!'
What could possibly go wrong?
I wouldn't say they were "awesome" during the youtube-dl stuff. They were slow to respond and non-transparent about what was happening behind the scenes.
Also, user's have been calling for GitHub to terminate their contract with ICE for a long time now[0] to no avail.
GitHub is better than most, no doubt, when it comes to "listen[ing] to their users" but they still have a ways to go.
[0](https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0)
MS is beholden to US.gov through contract cash and unspoken agreements - those ties are lessening, but are still pretty deep.
Today it's just companies reacting to any specific issue internet mob in social media has. They ban specific people or organizations based on mob activity.
So that it too can become an Apple / Google App Store where it can also control which apps, repositories are allowed or not? Essentially you're moving to another centralised platform, but the reason is because they 'listen to their users'? No thanks and no deal.
Hosting an app repository on your own website is fine and already decentralised. So far, Cydia and F-Droid are doing it right with being a potential alternative App Store.
Hosting your own apt repo isn't as difficult as it looks (all you need is a static file server) so it's a nice way to host your software if you have a collection of it.
Except various edge cases, you can technically visit any website that is served from any server, or you can install any application that has the correct binaries for your platform. What makes mobile devices different in this regard?
Apple offers a walled garden as an offering to i-device users. Other companies try to mimic Apple's success. Mobile devices simply do not have the same "must be able to install anything" requirements that a standard computer has.
If an application is properly sandboxed, and I can fully control the permissions of that sandbox, then I see no problems with that.
It's actually fun to do "apk add audacity" (yeah, there's also multiple gui frontends...) and have it installed and working as well as on desktop. OK, that one uses a traditional desktop interface, but it is still usable. Plug it into a docking station and use a mouse and keyboard + screen if you prefer.
Okay, that's not really sideloading, especially as each distro has its packaging format. You can use flatpaks for this (and they are sandboxes), some CIs provide builds as flatpaks (KDE does this).
One issue is that Linux executables are still very much architecture-dependent.
I like the pinephone and am going to buy one myself but I'm buying it because of linux reasons, not because I actually think it will be a good daily driver.
1. I did say it was usable, I am pretty sure most people could use it, although it wouldn't be a great pleasure (an personally I loathe these "addictive" mobile interfaces). One could get real work done with it.
2. I did say there was a gui for this. You don't have to type that if you don't want to. There are multiple gui front-ends with categories, descriptions, screenshots, ratings, etc. Courtesy of appstream metadata and packagekit, that both abstract away platform-specific package manager subtleties and provide "modern" store metadata.
3. This way a contrived example, there are simpler tools if all you want is record & play back.
4. "fun" is very subjective, that was part of my point.
Oh, and while we're on it, most distribution repositories are in fact walled gardens with a curated software selection (the audacity example above is part of it). That doesn't prevent you from sideloading whatever you want.
Moderation is orthogonal to stores.
We don't need stores. Some people might need filters. And multiple filters could exist for different audiences (children, grandmas who lack computer knowledge, etc.)
They need moderation because stores comes with policies.
Just now we have a situation where you can't even install an alternative app store in one platform and the other one is crippled.
And don't tell me apple has a small market share or you can use another vendor. Back when Microsoft was being forced to open up it was as extremely easy to install another browser and they still had to go to court.
Windows is ironically an extremely open system. All users are very used to doing what other platforms would call side loading. And all apps on windows have developed their own methods for receiving updates.
The Microsoft store for windows is pretty sad. Not because the interface sucks, at least not more so than google or apple ones, but because there isn't a real incentive for developers or users to use it.
Searching for a ssh client on the windows store shows ZERO free options, and all of them look worse than PuTTY. They are in the windows store strictly for visibility; which is a good use of an app store. But without the major players who don't need the limited visibility of that store, they users won't think to look there for their needs as well.
If Microsoft rebranded their app store the Github app store, Or made some easy pipeline for github actions to publish to their store; there would be a fair amount of people yelling "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" as well as fearing that microsoft is using the good will of GitHub to get to a similar world of the closed gardens of the others.
Lastly, Microsoft has not done so well in the mobile phone markets. Creating an android store similar to F-Droid would be a hard sell and limited appeal. Google very likely won't let you install the windows app store from the google app store. Apple will never allow a competitor on their platform _at all_ unless legally required.
I don't see how a GitHub app store could succeed.
But I switched to Linux, so I could not use any of the Microsoft tooling. Unless the store deployment can run on WINE?
Not true. It solves app distribution, install, and updates. We used it for an education app a couple of years ago and it was great.
Before that we used Electron with Squirrel and it was horrible for our users. For some reason the app wasn't installed in the start menu and if they deleted the desktop shortcut it was impossible for them to find it again.
Teams is a competitor of Slack, so going windows only would be stupid.
And among all other options, right now using electron is the most popular for cross platform apps. moreover, it also allows teams to have a single version for web and desktop
A good amount of competition will help solve a lot of problems, and very strongly highlight the ant-competitive practices inherent in these value chain verticalizations.
I respect Google wants to form a Union to influence who can and cannot be on YouTube, at the same time, I want absolutely nothing to do with some foreign special interest group dictating content to me, so let's have some choice, thanks.
Release integration is trivial for anyone. It's the easiest and most irrelevant part of the app stores.
> Unlike Google they actually listen to their users. They were awesome during youtube-dl debacle.
And controversial on others, like shutting down Popcorn Time's repository. As any other, they'll listen if there's enough outcry.
> Backed by Microsoft. Microsoft has been playing good by the developers for years now. I trust them more than Apple and Google.
This is situational and opportunistic. It can change any day. In fact, managing an important app store is exactly one way to re-(un)-balance this relationship.
> They could finally give the desktop the app store it deserves
Microsoft won't have GitHub compete with the Microsoft Store and its newer efforts like winget. It would unermine their unifying vision that has been in the works for years for no benefit.
> This is a minor but users will be able to raise issues with developers directly instead writing comments over app pages which I think you would agree completely suck.
Sure, lets pipe user feedback directly into GitHub issues. Good luck with that if you have a hundred issues a day.
I don't think there's a single angle that would paint this as a good idea. Phone manufacturers like Samsung are in a much much better position to try. And indeed they have been trying an failing.
Would they? Microsoft is still serving ICE, despite all the "grilling".
Then, at least do a cursory check to see if such an event has occurred already, it may well have.
https://mobile.twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1354194374...
If you have something to say, then please just say it without couching it behind vague terms and "you can connect the dots yourself" conspiratorial thinking.
It’s been known as “political correctness”, “social justice warriors”, “wokeness” and certainly a bunch of other names. The fundamental premise doesn’t change because it’s rooted in some deeper fear.
I'm not saying that the response to it isn't rooted in some deeper fear, but that doesn't mean that the phenomenon they are afraid of doesn't exist.
Just like "cosmopolitan" is a neutral/positive adjective by its dictionary definition, but has a very negative connotation in certain right-wing and/or anti-Semite circles.
I'm reluctant to name specific individuals, but there are people who embrace the "SJW" term for themselves. For example, the flair next to the username of this semi-famous developer[0] is a self-description that he is known for.[1]
Perhaps you could argue that he is being ironic, but it is a self-description and he certainly doesn't mean to mock people who identify that way.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2fddvg/im_matthew_ga...
[1] https://ostatic.com/blog/matthew-garrett-quits-kernel-to-do-...
Liberals believe in universality under the law, free speech, individualism, color-blindness, markets, equality of opportunity, rule of law.
The illiberal left, whatever you want to call them, are precisely the opposite. They believe in contextual application of the law, faction and outcomes-based speech tolerance, racial/gender/religious collectivism, and therefore racial consciousness, find markets to be inherently exploitative, determine equality/equity in accordance with population outcomes, and tailor systems around producing equitable collective outcomes, and believe in designing systems that are less principled in their means so much as they are pragmatic in pursuit of their ends.
As a liberal myself, I find this faction of the left (AOC/Robin Diangelo/Ibram X. Kendi/Ilhan Omar etc) to be the furthest political faction from my own.
The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen. But the goal of abandoning liberalism is not actually to abandon those things, but to actually really realize them.
The thesis is that our current systems are not principled either in their means or their ends.
And it is true. Free speech is proportional to your means to challenge threats to your livelihood. Rule of law, universality under the law, equality of opportunity, simply do not exist - depending mainly on your socio-economic status but also on other axes such as racial perception of the individual by society, and so on.
Equally, the thesis isn't that we shouldn't have color-blindness, simply that the current social and material reality makes this impossible. As a result of this, attempts/pretensions at color-blindness simply make the problem worse.
If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex. The exact same set of theories are applied to race, before racial abolition there must be a realization of the existence of racial identity (which is indeed the definition of race in the leftist sense - racial identity is completely orthogonal to traits and genetics, it is indeed a completely cultural and social phenomenon and process), then true racial equality, then essentially complete racial abolition.
Systems that actually provide real equality of opportunity will always provide actually equitable collective outcomes on the average.
Equally, the leftist opposition is not to markets themselves. The leftist opposition is to our current set of property relations and to the relationships of productions. Attempts to change those when the time is not opportune have been disastrous, so the aim is to compensate and slowly work towards actually fixing them using state intervention that ancillary limit the freedom of the free market. But there is no inherent opposition to markets at all.
This worldview is only a few decades younger than classical liberalism itself, and started with the disappointed third estate of the French Revolution. Put simply, the thesis is that classical liberalism failed to achieve its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that making good on those promises requires more careful and less idealistic theories of society and social change than the idealist ones of classical liberalism.
I just thought you would enjoy not arguing against strawmen.
I would take issue with your first point: many of those who ascribe to these theories believe that the principles you mention like free speech are inherently platonic: they cannot be achieved in any meaningful sense, regardless of what is done, due to the inherent nature of human beings. The measures you refer to often do not have the goal of bringing about justice through mechanisms other than coercion of society against its inherent nature (Ie, by force.) So I would argue that many abandon the goal of achieving them in the first place due to their unattainability. Ironically, honest liberals acknowledge the realities of the difficulty of ever attaining them in full - however the liberalist approach is that there is no other moral effort other than to try to close the gap as small as reality will permit, and that ultimately the method of steady, incremental progress towards attaining these things will in fact result in the best of all possible worlds.
I also agree that steady, incremental progress has a lot of value, and that there is probably a bit more improvement that is feasible within the liberal framework, which is why I'm glad to work with liberals on those.
The issue I have with the liberal perspective on this is that most of the imperfection (or gross deficiency, depending on the specific aspect) ultimately originates in economics, both socially and economically. The result of this is that (reluctantly) I had to recognize that these deficiencies are not solvable within the liberal framework, as it presupposes the economic and social relations that cause the issues. That said, I don't think that this change of framework shouldn't be done incrementally, if such a thing is at all possible.
On the moral side, though arguing morals of the internet quickly gets hairy, the leftist argument (this one I consider incomplete), is that there is quite some absurdity in claiming that using coercion for the goal of changing social relations in a way that will clearly improve society, since liberal society itself is ultimately based on massive amounts of coercion, which is reproduced by the perpetuation of the current framework.
I'd also take issue with the idea that society has an inherent nature which social change butts against. Indeed, not only are the mechanisms for social change, coercive as they may be, themselves a part of society and not extrinsic to it, but there is very little in the way of inherent nature as far as society is concerned, as society itself has seen almost total change in a great many ways as the relationships between the self, the social, and the material changed.
That said, I certainly understand your position, and my goal wasn't really to attempt to debate which viewpoint is right - not only is it that I cannot fully do them justice, but the nuances of of each one of our contentions I think merit a full thread or more by themselves. I just think a lot of liberals do not really understand the illiberal left at all. I think the peak of this was the Peterson vs Zizek debate, where Peterson read the Communist Manifesto once, and then operated in idées reçues for the actual positions of the illiberal left, in the process completely missing the point and leading to a non-debate.
To address some of your points. You say
> The thesis is that those things don't exist in the real world. And it goes further than that, by saying that those things cannot exist in our society unless major changes happen
Liberalism doesn't make a claim regarding whether or not things exist or not. It is a fixed compass of procedural principles. Completely consistent of means, independent of ends, and independent of the state of things. You can't say that "free speech doesn't exist in the real world," when free speech is a procedural description of the way the system should run. If there is a failure of free speech to be applied unilaterally, that isn't a failure of liberalism, so much as an implementation error, and a failure to actually run the system as described. Your argument is like saying that "habeas corpus doesn't exist because the Japanese were interned in WW2." Habeas corpus is a procedural description of a process. What happened in WW2 wasn't habeas corpus not existing, but an implementation failure where habeas corpus was not implemented.
Much of the liberal ethos was present in the country since the get-go, and the failures of the country were actually failures of implementation. How can you have slaves, how can you treat people differently in accordance with their race, how can women not vote, in a country whose espoused ethics describe systems that would in no way tolerate these failings? The strongest leaps forward in progress have come from making the claim "this is what the liberal ethos describes, and this is how you're failing at it." MLK or the suffragettes are making the case that they're being denied their ability to act as individual actors, being denied equality under the law.
Now, compare this to the modern left.
> If you didn't notice, the conclusion of the lefitst project after gender equality became progressive weakening and then almost abolition of gender - and I mean this in the strictest sociological sense of gender as the perception of a set of social attributes related to sex.
You have described the exact opposite of what the modern left is. In the 60s-00s, the movement regarding gender equality was primarily what I would have described as a liberal movement. One that is hyper focused on individualism, and asserting that identity could exist as independently from sex or race as one wanted. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, that is as valid an expression of what it means to be a female as any other variant. This is an anti-collective, purely individualistic position, and is spot on with the liberal assertions of individualism and (gender)-blindness.
The modern leftist position is a complete inversion of this. If you are a girl, and you have short hair, and you like fighting, and skateboarding, and you're sexually attracted to women, are you sure you're not a boy? Your gender presentation is rather male, you must at least be non-binary? Do you see how this is a complete inversion? It goes back to making the assertion that these gender expressions are actually fundamentally to be associated with fixed collectives. I find it to be a much more powerful expression for a man to have long hair, wear dresses and makeup, love whoever they want to love, and say "I'm a man, and this is what being a man means to me." I don't take any issue with that same person asserting that they're a woman, I just think,...
One of the common patterns of this is the assumption that guilt-by-extra-vague-association (such as having a Parler account) or silence-is-complicity are reasonable ways to motivate extra-judicial justice against people, such as getting them fired, as was done here. These are fundamentally illiberal philosophies, both in their content and their explicit rejection of liberalism as a force for good in society.
I wasn't couching what I was saying in any way. I was saying that if you do not think the kinds of behavior we are seeing where people's lives are being ruined by mob justice are anything other than "bogeymen", you ought to write down where the line is for you to honestly reconsider your position. In any situation where society slips slowly into madness, a lack of self-recognition where ones breaking points are contributes greatly to that slide.
That's not how I took their response at all. I believe they were specifically picking up your derogatory use of the term "woke". If you meant "illiberal", why not use that term? It's far less ambiguous and less loaded.
More seriously if you think that's a problem IMO the solution is to ask for better employee protection laws so that people can't be fired at will. This is not a free speech problem IMO, it's a worker right issue.
And if it turns out that her contract did mention that she shouldn't publicly engage in something that would damage the company's image or something of the sort, well, that's just the way it works really.
Gab isn't a far right white supremacist website. It's just right wing Twitter. I don't understand where all this hyperbole comes from but it's a perfect example of the low-information individuals we have in society today.
Just take a quick look at the comments on the top stories in the “Gab trends” section:
https://trends.gab.com/item/60163b8f144291532b8bccb0 Bill gates conspiracy theorists
https://trends.gab.com/item/601682466beb1e3de3156fe1 “Pence is a traitor!”
https://trends.gab.com/item/6016992e144291532b8d5986 “Socialists are murderers!”
Are these normal right wing talking points?
I've seen equally whacky things trending on the left side, e.g. "Russian Ads on Facebook won Trump the election".
Why is that "whacky"? There were Russian ads.[1] They obviously intended to affect the election result (because why bother otherwise). Whether or not they were actually successful in affecting the election is unknowable. But it's not flat-earther-whacky to think they succeeded.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report#Social_media_ca...
Both left and right have it's stupid moments, if you can't see that it's you with the bias, not me.
I'm aware I'm biased, but in this case the facts are in plain sight for Russian ads. A Republican authored that report. You may think yourself unbiased by saying "both sides are the same" but both sides are in fact not the same at all.
The "right" may say the same about "election fraud" but saying is not the same as having a well-sourced report, and federal investigation that netted multiple indictments and convictions.
3 of the top 10 gab groups are pushing the Qanon conspiracy theory, one is pushing the “StopTheSteal” extremist movement.
For anyone who doesn’t believe this is a thing, here’s a Washington Post article:
“Opinion: To understand Trump’s support, we must think in terms of multiracial Whiteness”
https://archive.is/d6Ydz
As soon as someone starts complaining about "woke" and "SJWs" and "cancel culture" and so on, I know I can just switch off and disengage, as anything they have to say on the topic will be some reactionary bullshit they're parroting at me.
Of course, there might be reasons form Microsoft to create an alternative to the App Stores say for a gaming marketplace etc. But specifically for GitHub I cannot see why they would be interested in the overhead.
They charge said developers a few dollars a month per seat. GitHub could somehow instead be taking a 0%-20% cut topline revenue from some of the apps they host.
Lots of work to make that happen the upside might make it worth while.
I dont know what a normal person would be doing on github.
If GitHub could somehow solve the demand side (Phone users) they'd be sorted.
I’m not saying it’s the best thing for GitHub to do, but...
Let’s say 15% of Android top 1000 apps are sitting in private repos on GitHub. With their build tools GitHub make it possible to automatically push builds to this imaginary store, they offer devs 50% discount on whatever cut google take if on the play store.
That light at the end of this tunnel is an oncoming train. Not freedom.
Apple - Blocked
Android - Pointless without a drop in replacement for Google Services.
Windows- This is possible, but Windows doesn't really have a distribution problem. There's no real need here.
Linux - Again possible, but no real need
You have a source for that claim?
The specific advantage is that it makes switching providers really hard. You develop in Atom, store the code in GitHub, use GitHub Actions for CI/CD (if that's viable, I'm not super familiar with the product), use GitHub to manage the released artifacts, and publish them to GitHub's app store.
That makes it really appealing to buy because you don't have to talk to 7 different vendors and duct tape their solutions together with Python scripts. You talk to 1 vendor, who gives you all the pieces, and the pieces are already able to communicate natively.
It makes it really appealing to sell because once you buy in, it's really hard to get back out. Imagine trying to replace all of those components, and the developer time you lose as people get used to the new systems and how they all work together. Bonus points if you can only publish to the GitHub app store from GitHub installations. GitLab can do a lot of those things, but they don't have an app store.
As others pointed out though, it would compete with Microsoft's existing app store. I would not be terribly surprised to see some kind of integration between GitHub and MS's app store, or Azure and their app store though.
I don't think people understand what an average (and below average) cell phone user is like. Just read some of the App store reviews (fraction of the people that use apps actually write reviews).
This pipe-dreaming would come crashing down from being a minor issue to major, the wrath of an average user is insane.
It would be business as usual under a different Big Tech name.
Given the garbage-grade issues I have often seen from professional engineers, this sounds like a complete nightmare.
I agree. Sorting huge, multinational, publicly traded companies in friends and enemies list is so obviously bogus and immature that it baffles me that this is so prevalent.
Microsoft is not your enemy. It's not your friend (unless you're one of the shareholders). It's profit driven and amoral. They'll always line up with whatever they believe will maximize profits because that their entire reason for existing.
Apparently Microsoft decided that being more FLOSS friendly (after decades of trying to annihilate these projects, lest we forget) because they decided that it would favor them in the long run.
If they ever decide that they stand to make more profit by throwing the whole github ethos under the bus they will. A few people will make strongly worded blog posts that will reach the top of HN. A few employees might even quit and loudly slap the door on the way out. Then probably nothing will happen.
During that time Google was very friendly to FLOSS, and open protocols (remember when GChat was just a XMPP client)
Today MS and Google seems to have flipped, Google now is fully embracing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, where MS seems to be attempting to wind that back though with mixed success
https://github.com/emacs-lsp/lsp-mode/issues/1863#issuecomme...
Lately, I love what they've been doing. Even github -- there have been disappointments, for sure, but nothing like the egregious misbehavior in the bad old days. But given their history; given Google's "do no evil" bait&switch... I don't want to hand them more power.
It'd be cool if an interested third party could build out an app store that automatically sources from github (and its competitors), though.
That’s called a package repository and there are hundreds (thousands?) of them.
An “App Store” is a vertically integrated package repo.
Element is actually in the F-droid store but the version is outdated.
From what I could see it was also difficult to switch the office suite. My OEM installed trial versions of word, excel, etc. which were set to be opened by default on all related file extensions. Switching to libreoffice was a PITA, I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
Back when I used Gmail, I'd open my email and get not one, but TWO separate things, one a popup box, and one a top bar, telling me I should switch to Chrome, and dismissing it never stuck. It'd come back in a week or so. Even once Edge started running on Chrome code, Google stepped up writing new tricks to claim that Edge was "less secure" because it didn't direct telemetry straight to Google servers.
Google's underhanded push with Chrome has hurt everyone, and unfortunately, Microsoft probably can't "target just Chrome" in retaliating against such messaging, so Firefox gets hit too.
The only way to actually make a local account is to either (a) refuse to connect to WiFi until after an account is made or (b) disconnect the router while it is trying to talk to Microsoft. Option (a) is inaccessible by the time you realize that there is a problem, and option (b) is ridiculous and needs to be found on third-party suggestions. All so that Microsoft can pull in another email address.
Windows 10 installation has become a maze which only the really savvy can escape with their privacy somewhat in tact.
I never had this bullshit on PRO versions, but I'm connected through cable tho.
There are perhaps better anecdotes for reasons to dislike windows...
Personally, I'm still annoyed that removed the File Types settings in Windows 7(?), though some of them have made their way back with the new settings.
Install a Package Manager like Chocolety [1], AppGet [2] or the new "Official" one WinGet
>>I couldnt find a simple, one-click way to change all these. I had to go over them one-by-one.. (.doc, .docx, .dochtml, .docxhtml, .xls, .xlsx, .xlshtml, .xslsxhtml,....)
Yea MS has tried to bork this, but in the "Default Apps" settings page of the new "Settings" Application, there is a link called "Set Defaults by App" that makes it MUCH easier than what you did which was "Choose Default Apps by File Type"
[1] https://chocolatey.org/
[2] https://appget.net/
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli
Do you really believe Microsoft is changing their tactics because they want to?
They needed to change.
Their goal which has always been Platform, around 12 years ago they realized it had to be open open towards everything else than Windows only. Otherwise they would be seriously under pressure.
Why do you think Azure is so popular with other platforms too, other than ms tech?
Microsoft is really really good at setting and reaching goals. They excel at it. And believe you me, that their goal is not to approve and support open source because they shifted their mindset towards it - it's because they had to - and they will make money doing it.
These statements about companies, being kind towards this or that, has to be read carefully. They are savages in the end and will do pretty much anything to win.
I worked at MS for many years. Not any longer.
People are not rational actors, and the myth that we are is incredibly harmful.
- Interests of the shareholders and other stakeholders, who most likely cannot agree on most of their goals, but they will agree on "money = good";
- Competitors who wait for the company to make a mistake they can exploit to get ahead, or possibly kill the company
Combined, these forces all but ensure the company has no choice but to be a amoral profit maximizer, or die.
A different analogy, that doubles down on "corporation is essentially an AI" view, but may make it easier to explain the main point: if you apply Maslow's pyramid to companies, most of them do not have their Physiological and Safety levels met. They operate in survival mode. Rarely, a company "feels" secure enough to ponder long-term visions or some ideals that aren't directly survival-related.
Companies are not perfect optimizers. Arguably not even that strong. If someone in Purchasing is willing to reward their buddy instead of picking the best vendor for the job, well, that happens. It's noise. Doesn't change the overall behavior of the company. And it only happens within limits - do it too much, and the person in Purchasing will find themselves fired, maybe even charged with a crime. If they're too good, maybe they can kill their own company - much like a sickness can kill a human. Other companies will then be more vigilant.
Also worth noting that companies strive to improve their process and develop various means of ensuring and enforcing accountability - this, in essence, is trying to reduce the "noise" of individual humans within the larger AI of the company.
Microsoft and Google being recent examples of companies shifting their moral compass fairly quickly.
If that's true, then why do brands exist?
For most companies, the best way to drive profit is to build a long term relationship of trust with their customers and suppliers.
Edit: this doesn't mean I'm ready to join the Microsoft/Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon fan club, but I can see that some companies regularly behave better than others, and I'm happy to act on that reputation. Take Oracle, for example.
When Github restored youtube-dl, they increased user trust while undermining media industry trust. When they pulled popcorntime, they did the reverse.
In each case, they were presumably acting rationally to preserve their relationships as best as they could. But whether or not that benefits you as an individual is more or less a toss of a coin.
This is a bogus line of thinking. For example, Apple have a very strong stance on privacy compared to FB and Google.
Does this mean they are more moral or trustworthy when it comes to privacy, or that you should trust them to remain focussed on privacy in the future?
Not at all! Their focus on privacy is a smart business model that they use to differentiate themselves from the competition. As soon as it stops being a smart model, or a better model presents itself, under the bus their focus on privacy will go. Apple being focussed on privacy right now should not be taken as them having a good reputation. They do not care about your privacy. They care about you buying their products. The same applies to all apparent "good" or "moral" behavior of any large company. It's not genuine morality, they don't care about the benefits to you or society at large. They just want you to generate money for them.
By all means, choose products from a company whose presented morality currently aligns with yours. But don't believe that morality is genuine, and don't get hooked on that company. Instead use them, just as they are using you, for as long as it benefits you, then dump them in a second when they inevitably change... Just as they would do to you.
Taking my Oracle example, I'm definitely never going to recommend my company adopts Oracle. Given their historical behaviour, it's just too much risk!
This position that all companies are equally amoral seems 1. blind to reality and 2. to be throwing away useful information.
The likely actions of a company are embedded in their culture, their structure, the people who choose to work there, and the personalities of their leadership. That can all change, but you have the ability to observe that change and punish companies which violate your trust.
That's both unfair, and quite frankly lets companies like Boeing off the hook. Executives get paid egregious amounts of money to set the direction of companies. Yes, some do focus solely on profit and it's generally obvious when they do. Some focus on making customers happy at nearly all costs. And there is everything in between. Of course management at all those companies believe their approach will make the company money, but plenty aren't solely focused on maximizing profits, I'd argue MS included.
I'm very sceptical that such a company exists (at least of any size beyond a small restaurant or similar). Can you give an example?
Samsung is bothering me. I have an S8 and they want to replace all the standard Google apps - including the basic text messageing one - with Samsung equivalents.
It's not clear why and I haven't gone looking. It feels like they're just trying to displace Google and be another company reading my messages and monitoring my activity. I figure I don't need another one of those in my life. If their intent is to help me by offering privacy respecting alternatives they have not done so. I'm also completely unaware of any app-store Samsung may have beyond a place for them to push their versions of these apps.
Am I wrong? Should I be looking closer at what Samsung has to offer?
But things like Samsung health send data home too unfortunately.
They are stepping back from cloud services a bit now and letting Microsoft step in, also not privacy driven but more financial I think.
Dog bites man is not news, and neither are most of the Samsung software travesties ranging from software supply chain debacles to TV spying to data breaches.
Nobody even cares in the tech community because no one expects anything of them.
I think Google is doing a good job with their Pixel phones indeed in terms of security, though they need longer support IMO. Samsung seems to just call everything 'knox' but not really specify what exactly they're doing. So from a security point of view I agree.
What? It can get way worse than Google. For all the privacy invasive things that Google does it’s one of the least bad. Unlike most companies that collect data it doesn’t directly sell user data, and it has a good history of avoiding security vulnerabilities that leak data.
I suppose the Chinese state and the apps they control like WeChat is worse in terms of what they do with the data (this social credit score etc). You're right. I was mainly thinking about the collection itself, not what is done with it.
What I mind mainly about Google is that they use it as payment for their services but don't provide any option to opt out and just pay with money. Though I suppose even if they did that at this stage, I wouldn't trust them.
Well, what about Huawei who want to send your data to China?
I wish I could do this. I have 32 GB space on my phone. Half of it is wasted on pre-installed junk I cannot delete because "it came with the phone". This involves games, or something like "Booking.com", and so forth.
Samsung is vastly worse. Consider off the bat that South Korea has wildly different (read ‘permissive and lax’) laws about police and government access to stored data.
There has never been any indication that Microsoft would unilaterally shut down Windows software. If fact they are uniquely open in terms of modern proprietary OS's.
Yes, so far they've ended up backpedaling every time they've tried to enforce the store, but it's pretty clear what their intentions are.
And the way they run a store is consistently horrible that it feels impossible to make worse. Full of horror stories, bans and rejections, sometimes even random pick deletions since Xbox Live Indie Games days, to at least as recent as just few quarters ago.
There are reasons why people choose iOS, Android, .msi file download from GitHub and so on over Microsoft Store.
There's a more fundamental issue: GitHub issues are for developers to report bugs and file feature-requests, they aren't intended for user support, even if that's sometimes how they're used.
Go on...
This honestly sounds like it could be a feature with the right automation. Devs are often separated from customers by multiple layers of "flappers" who's sole job is to triage, organize, and perform manual resolution of customer issues.
If your app is large enough to receive hundreds of issues a day, then it's likely there are entire teams of "flappers". What if that could be entirely automated such that customer complaints were grouped by pain point, and automatically ranked based on how many customers are affected and how severely they are affected?
This seems like an oddly practical problem to solve in 2021.
Average user is less than poorly educated about technology. Their level of competence when raising a bug is simply pathetic, a lot of times. I manage an email server for a family, they write to me "email doesn't work", I check issue and respond "domain should be gmail.com not gmail,com" (notice the comma).
This reminded me how sqlite team was getting emails or calls at night, from some random people because another software was crashing. User went to "about/legal" and found license of SQLite, so obviously they decided to contact SQLite and complain on bad software. https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d/src/os.h#L52-...
Now imagine facebook api breaks backwards compatibility, so you get 1000 of new issues in a day with title "broken", "doesn't work", "shit is crahing so gave 1* fix it now I might review it later".
Perhaps they could integrate github and winget/snap (for the linux side).
Like, here your Github release page, just one extra click and you can automatically publish to winget (for Windows) and to snap (for Linux).
What's the controversy? Popcorn Time IS illegal. Butter-desktop however is not, and is still active on GitHub.
1. There is no GitOS. So the target environment would be so variable and high friction that it's unclear to me how GitHub would manage clean builds and installation.
2. I'd say MOST repos aren't anywhere near ready to run. Making an automated binary/msi/apk/ pathway would almost certainly lead to broken packages for the majority of repos.
Just download the proper release for your platform and Rock'n'Roll.