Hacker News Reader

Comment by tytso | Hacker News Reader

The article talks about "free and open source" software in its text, so it's clear that "free" is referring to FSF version of free.

But then it talks about distributing binaries. Cry my a river; most FOSS can and should be distributed primarily in source form, in a git repo hosted on a site like github. FOSS software can be released via distributions that can supply controlled, and accountable, and digitally signed binary packages to end users who aren't skilled enough to build from source. This includes Debian, SuSE, Google Play Store, Amazon App Store, Microsoft store, etc.

Training users to download binaries from random web sites? That's a security disaster, and it's a Good Thing that web browsers discourage such reckless behavior.

View on HN

This also affects freeware / shareware / people who want to avoid "store" monopolies and their associated tax. This also affects people who are used to download binaries from reputable sites, because Google did not manage to understand correctly what is reputable or not (and honestly trying to automate everything in this area is a recipe for disasters)

One alternative is a package manager like https://scoop.sh/. It's built-in repositories are vetted/curated, free to publish on and simple to install/use.

There is the downside that it's a cli-based app, but that's easily overcome with a GUI frontend add-on.

One of my favorite parts of it's architecture is that it's got a mechanism for adding third party repositories (buckets), so while the publishing policy for the main bucket is mostly limited to development tools, it wouldn't be hard for the community to build a new bucket for independent software developers to use as a general distribution mechanism.

So if Google can't understand what is reputable site or not, how do you expect the average user to figure it out? I tell my parents they should never-never-never download random binaries from a web site. The last time my Dad did it, his Windows machine got completely p0wned, and I had to completely reinstall it from scratch.

And freeware/shareware have no tax on most stores, since 30% of zero is still zero.

All of my software is either ISC or GPLv3. Source code links are available on all of my download pages. I've had to remove the pre-compiled binaries for users.

Both Microsoft and Apple ban my specific class of software (emulators) in spite of unanimous court rulings establishing them as legal under fair use laws.

Have you considered releasing the binaries as releases on GitLab or GitHub?

That's at least how I would try to work around the issue.

Regarding the blog post: I think this is a side effect of making the web a "safer" place for all kinds of users; nothing which I appreciate personally but I understand why a large mass of users clicking everything is a concern for Google/Microsoft/Apple.

I was once thinking that people could be educated to use the web in a better and safer way...now I think everyone (tech-savy users, big corporations) has given up on that and that "safe by default" is the norm.

I have, some comments here suggest those pages get flagged as well. It does me no good if I move to a GitHub page that gets blocked, and I would also have to deal with some sites choosing to link to GitHub directly, which would bypass the work I put into my site on documentation, tutorials, etc.

> a GitHub page that gets blocked

I have never seen this happening, but if you come around proof of this please share the information.

Edit: this is the proof: https://twitter.com/notdan/status/1209642463859630081

They fixed it afterwards.

> some sites choosing to link to GitHub directly

They can link directly to the download on your site to the same effect?

Yes, emulators are legal, and you can use them to play homebrew that is FOSS, but the majority of people seem to use them to play non-free ROMs which are often obtained illegally. They are useless to most without these additional non-free binaries. The major software distributors understandably want nothing to do with this. And I'm saying this as a big fan of your work. I consider having working references in software for all those old chips to be important -- but I doubt anyone else has bothered to collect every single retro game cart in existence just to dump them and say they could play them legally on bsnes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com