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Comment by erik_kemp | Hacker News Reader

1) Personal favourite: Collaboration between Fairphone and E-foundation https://e.foundation/fairphone-and-e-expand-the-availability...

2) https://www.radicallyopensecurity.com/ (Non-Profit Computer Security Consultancy)

3) https://tutanota.com/

4) The ActivityPub and Mastodon contributors

5) Matrix (https://matrix.org/)

6) Signal (https://signal.org)

7) https://brave.com

8) Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

9) Standard Notes (https://standardnotes.org/)

10) https://Plausible.io

11) https://small-tech.org/

12) https://www.bitsoffreedom.nl/english/

Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.

Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects: https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)

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> Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value

> https://brave.com

Do you trust Brave after they did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027?

> Signal (https://signal.org)

Signal is essentially s closed source walled garden now, because they do not publish their server code anymore.

About Brave:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25839277

The question was: "What companies are you excited about?"

I won't argue these organisatoins are perfect. Is that your criterion? I'm excited because I feel they are going in the right direction. That's why I'm using their services. I use Brave, but don't have the time to dive into things they are doing well or doing wrong. That's what we have investigative journalism for. I'm very happy to pay for that. By the way, I also use Signal. I also have a Fairphone. etc etc.

The next step after excitement is of course to convert excitement into action, and to actually support these organisations, through buying their stuff or making donations. Not because they are doing everything well, but because I personally believe they are helping to improve society.

The source to their server seems open source licensed and available: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

Wikipedia also says their server is open source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

So where is the source for the latest patch fixing this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803010 ?

"Open source" does not mean "all patches immediately published."

I'm curious how long you need to wait before you declare it non-open-source.

> I'm curious how long you need to wait before you declare it non-open-source.

I'm not sure there is a practical upper limit. Ghostscript for example for years only released as open source the version prior to the current one, and no one claimed that the existence of a proprietary fork invalidated the status of the open source version, no matter how long the delay between releases.

Admittedly there are differences, in Signal's case the deployed version is not currently released at all, but the worst case would be "open source version is no longer maintained", at which point I suspect that several forks would spring up, causing some confusion until one gained traction and dominance.

Right now, the latest release is 9 months old. This is certainly annoying and even concerning, but not yet cause for outright alarm, which can probably wait until March has gone by with no announced release schedule.

/e/ OS (e-foundation) is great, I love the privacy I get by cutting off Google from my life and still using Android apps. /e/ + FP3+ works great.

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