Mastodawn

Simon Phipps Jul 21, 2023

While F-Droid appears to be "just" an alternative #OpenSource #AppStore for #Android, it is actually the apex of a lifestyle movement that's choosing to use Android only with #FreeSoftware and without #Google or advertising-related #surveillance. Realising that makes many of its features - and shortcomings - easier to understand. I was the main interviewer in the discussion this week on #FLOSS Weekly with core @fdroidorg developer @eighthave and it was a good show.

https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/741?autostart=false

This Is the F-Droid You’re Looking For | TWiT.TV

Doc Searls and Simon Phipps talk with Hans-Christoph Steiner about all things F-Droid: the non-Google app store for Android where you don't need an account and find only free and o…

TWiT.tv

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Dan Brown Jul 21, 2023

@webmink @fdroidorg @eighthave Good episode, my respect for F-Droid grows every-time I find out more about it and each time I use it, a great project.

On a tangential note, is there a process for when an app drops out of the inclusion policy? I think I came across an example yesterday, where a company has made changes to their licensing.

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Hans-Christoph Steiner Jul 22, 2023

@danb @webmink @fdroidorg By "drops out", do you mean like if an app adds a proprietary lib? In that case, we've handled that many times. We also have handled many cases of changing Anti-Features on existing apps. We generally engage with upstream in these cases, and work through the issue. Many upstreams are thankful because we caught something they didn't know was happening. Occasionally, upstreams are very grumpy about it, and even demand their app is removed from f-droid.org.

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Dan Brown

@eighthave @webmink @fdroidorg

This particular case is where components/parts of the app may have moved to a non-floss license.

The licensing is not too clear, so I've queried this with the maintainers: https://github.com/standardnotes/forum/discussions/3196
Saw they were on F-Droid, which got me thinking about how apps with license changes are handled.

Clarification on project's license and open source state · standardnotes/forum · Discussion #3196

Hello 👋, Just came across this project, and saw the app being advertised as open source, like on this page where it's advertised as "100% open source". Looking at the app repo though, the licensing...

GitHub

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Hans-Christoph Steiner Jul 24, 2023

@danb @webmink @fdroidorg We have some automated scans for license changes, but we always appreciate when people let us know when they see something. We have a harder problem than say Debian since #Android apps are basically all built using dependencies from #MavenCentral, which doesn't enforce that things published there are #FLOSS. https://f-droid.org/2022/07/22/maven-central.html

Maven Central is not as free as it looks | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

F-Droid is always commited to distribute FOSS Android apps. Building freesoftware from source for Android comes with a different set of challengesfrom GNU/Li...

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David Bremner Jul 24, 2023

@eighthave

Debian's upstream's don't enforce that things are FLOSS either; that's a big part of the labour of packaging for Debian, in my experience.

@danb @webmink @fdroidorg

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Simon Poole Jul 24, 2023

@eighthave @danb @webmink @fdroidorg again this glosses over the downside that if a dependency needs a patch (security or functional) and there is no expectation that this will happen within your release time frame, you need to hard fork and re-publish to remain f-droid compatible.

And yes I've had to do that too many times in IRL to let this nonsense pass as is.