Proprietary software

I’d rather use other DB

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Dear Packt publishing, yesterday you wanted to make me a gift giving me a free copy of a book of yours.

I shall thank you. One must always thanks for a gift.

Yet I am somehow mithered to discover that the book deals with proprietary software. Namely Azure Cosmos DB.

I strive to avoid proprietary software as much as possible as I prefer Freedom. Nevertheless I downloaded it: I may learn something new. As Automattic’s creed says: “I will never stop learning.“.

As Forrest Gump’s mother once said:

“Life is like a box of chocolates: one You never know what you’re gonna get.”

Given my current workload I wonder when I will be able to read it.

A damning internal Facebook document

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court

Source: British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court / Boing Boing

Expecially:

…they show Facebookers at the highest level — up to CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — conspiring to trick Android users about how much data was being gathered by an update to the Facebook app

So I was doing good sticking to theire mobile website and refusing to install their apps, even the “lite” one.

Like a drug

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

I naïvely thought that I wasn’t so reliant on the “we have shun our don’t be evil motto” organization (hint G00gle).

How fool I was. I didn’t even have the phone number of my wife saved into my own CardDav address book.

She phoned me to ask about my sprained ankle and my phone didn’t even recognised her call.

The tittle of this piece maybe excessive. I suspect that many proprietary services are similar. Until a few days ago I shunned the golden prison of Apple. Google is no better. Android may be Free Software but being released with a non persistent license it is only instrumental to give Google more power.

Posted on by Paolo Redaelli

Not only WhatsApp is proprietary software but it doesn’t even like to run on a pure Android release which I have to remind you is Free Software.

Sadly its freedom is not persistent so it can be turned and it is too often turned into proprietary.

Telegram happily runs on many terminals at the same time. You can move your SIM from a phone to another and it doesn’t have anything to quarry about. WhatsApp instead insists on having one and one only terminal to control. And it keep losing data unless you backup it on a proprietary service (aka Google Drive) and no, it doesn’t allow you to download it. Unless you “voluntary” choose to lock yourself into the golden and sweet prison of proprietary services.

It took me years to acknowledge it: Google’s walled garden is the same as Apple’s: a golden and comfortable prison.

Escaping those prisons is not easy neither fast.

I will escape. I will be free.

Sticking to FairPhone Open is one of the required steps. It shows how pervasive, sweet yet subtle are the shackles of the great G which by the way has shunned its choice not to be evil some years ago.

I’ve been mainly using Free as in freedom software since 1997. Now the time has come to really stick to freedom even in mobile.

Until my Puri.sm Librem5 will come. Then things will get serious.