Librem Chat = Riot.im
Librem Social = Mastodon (specifically the Tusky app)
Librem Mail = K9 Mail
Librem Tunnel = OpenVPN
The alternative seems to be walled gardens.
Other companies do similar things, such as Fastmail which develops the open source IMAP server Cyrus [1]. I've been a happy Fastmail customer for years. Cyrus is still free for anyone to use even though Fastmail makes money from it.
Like 5% to Riot, 5% to Mastodon, 5% to K9.
Could also give to the GNOME Foundation, Linux Foundation, and OpenVPN, but I think those are pretty sustainable already.
I'd easily pay $10 a month for this if they make it clear they're going to give back to the open source projects included.
So while you have a point, I think "quite dishonest" is a bit too much condemnation. The stack is so big, with the majority of energy already being siphoned off by SaaS bundlers, it's basically impossible to rebuild the entire stack anti-surveillance-like as one big release. Rather we're going to end up with many approaches, each trying to solve a bit of the problem. The bit of the problem being solved here is really the popularization angle - making an easy touchstone recommendation for someone who is interested in privacy but would/could/should never self-host.
I quickly picked up that the Chat was Matrix, and assumed the tunnel was openvpn or wireguard (designing a new protocol would be a priori cryptographic incompetence). So perhaps constructive feedback to better summarize the underlying software for people "in the know" is worthwhile. But writing off the actual value-add of the project, the productization itself, mainly just results in hindering the ability of the Free community to market.
Personal side note: I’m not a fan of branding open source apps. It delays security updates and waters down the original brands; Riot and K9 have good reputations; Why not utilize those?
The first is that librem may need to make changes that cannot be accepted by upstream. It can be features they need to have now to keep users happy. But another example could be that they want their Riot to default to their homeserver and not to matrix.org. You don't want to wait until you get a trademark conflict with the main project.
The second reason could be that Librem has to market their brand. If they keep Riot for example, people type it in google and end up on the official riot site, then it may be hard for Librem to attract new users.
This isn't valid. They could absolutely ship Riot with its existing branding, with a config set to use their (or any other) homeserver. The matrix.org homeserver just happens to be the default (at the moment).
If the user calls Librem support then they have figure out what is going on. Which costs money and they still have a frustrated user.
Branding is often not about what is technically or legally possible, but about creating the right perception with users.
Either way, anything that gets people using more encrypted open-source software is totally okay with me.
As long as they are transparent about their stack and the authors of the software are cool with it - why not have it bundled with clean packaging and a slick donation model?
From the page it's clear they are also providing hosted file and email servers via subscription in addition to the branded-clients. Which is why I asked specifically about VPN hosting.
> Librem Mail – end-to-end encrypted email used by nearly everybody already
> Librem Tunnel – end-to-end encrypted VPN tunnel proven by millions of users
> Librem Social – public social media with millions of people already active
I was wondering what they meant, _how could the apps of something that haven't yet launched be used by "millions of active users"_.
But, the Social app looks exactly like a twitter screen shot, and the VPN looks identical to PIA’s iOS app.
The chat UI isn’t great, and the Mail app is even worse. They all look like apps you would find on F-Droid which are great, but I wouldn’t feel excited about paying monthly for an app suite that lacking in polish.
Their claims of millions of active users on each of the services also seem questionable. Maybe if they’re counting the total number of XMPP users I could see that.
Lastly, the framing of donating to what is by definition a for-profit company is off putting for me personally.
Also, while Purism is indeed a for-profit company, it's actually an interesting case since it's a Social Purpose Corporation - it's not there to maximize profits, but to maximize its social purpose. It legally can't do anything that would be at odds with its legally defined social purpose: https://puri.sm/about/social-purpose/
With Librem One you get a Mastodon account on there own Mastodon instance. That instance can speek with all other instances on the fediverse with ActivityPub protocol. So yes, with Librem Social you can easy connect with more then 2 million people.
I mean, I like what Librem does in general and I also think that marketing those apps as a uniform service (without distracting attributions) is definitely a pro for consumers, but if I would be one of the contributors to those projects I might be a bit pissed off if they didn't ask for permission.
Selling people collections of software (which you didn’t code yourself, you simply repackaged) on floppy disk or tape was an old-school practice in the Free Software world and generally considered perfectly fair.
I did wonder how they got all these apps out of the gate so quickly.. they didn't.
Librem Mail – Standard SMTP/IMAP/POP MTA, with OpenPGP
Librem Tunnel – OpenVPN
Librem Chat – Matrix, XMPP (coming soon)
Librem Social – ActivityPub
Edit: formatting
Also notice, in their "alternative graphics" none of the open source clients are listed.