Simple Mobile Tools suite to be acquired by Israeli adware company
github.com
github.com
I don't necessarily blame the developer for selling: I understand that some offers are difficult to refuse. But I absolutely do blame him for being dishonest to his users and contributors.
No one was told about this. People only found out about the sale by chance, because someone noticed that the Play Store listing details were changed and made a post on Reddit.
When confronted on GitHub, the developer gave evasive answers, citing vague and unrelated issues, such as "the quality of the Android ecosystem dropping".
I assume a lot of users bought these apps with the expectation that they were not infested with ads, data mining, dark patterns, etc. Most people have automatic updates enabled, and they will get all of the above shoved into their face before they can prevent it.
The value of these acquisitions is determined almost entirely by the userbase. The developer was only able to get this deal because of his users. At the very least, they deserved to be treated with some basic amount of respect.
What a bunch of idiots.
Now, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom of that thread and GitHub, but no one really seem to ask him why he didn’t give notice of to anybody. The comments were either like, no, don’t do it, or we’ve gotta fork this. They weren’t really about how he has handled the issue.
With liberal licenses (BSD, etc), the license permits distributing binaries without releasing the code so re-licensing isn't even necessary. Any corp can take the code and make it proprietary in full compliance with the original license.
GPL, on the other hand, can make it possible for a corp to buy the project and effectively prevent further development, like it happened with MySQL.
That's not correct.
All of the MySQL GPL code was and is free for continued development. The company has no right to stop you or me from continuing to work on it. MariaDB was forked from MySQL and continues to be GPL licensed.
How do you think the GPL "effectively prevent further development"?
here's one example of ads in FOSS https://github.com/zealdocs/zeal/issues/779
One day the developer decided to switch to a pay SaaS model. They updated the open source app to be a thin client for their web service.
Surely many existing users on the play store found quite a surprise when they updated!
F-Droid at least provides a little protection here, with the independent builds and easy downgrades, and if the community is big enough you see forks appear. But sadly this kind of cashing in is always going to be a risk with open source software in app stores.
That being said, the lack of transparency is not acceptable. Apart from one little acknowledgement in the above GitHub issue, there's zero communication on his part. Given that people actually paid, donated or even contributed source to his projects, even if it was not much, he has an obligation to these users/contributors and be open about the future of these apps. Most importantly:
- Will the apps remain FOSS? If a license change is planned, what about people who contributed and don't agree with that change?
- Which releases will be affected: What about the "Pro" version people paid for? What about the versions on F-Droid?
The web site still says "A group of simple, open source Android apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors." They're on F-Droid.
Expecting project maintainers to solely fund the development of open source projects used by millions of people is the leopard that keeps eating our faces.
A stronger economy is always better, but politicians usually manage to screw that one up, also.
But I don't think all of that is a major issue here. Microsoft and IBM are taking open-source projects and closing them up. Google is offering FLOSS projects to get users, then poisoning the well. I don't know what's happened to Mozilla, but it's destroying itself.
Lots of individuals are still writing FLOSS projects, but hobbies get picked up and dropped often -- for something to last, you usually need an organization (even if it's just 3 people) and it can easily become a _job_, even if it's a non-paying job. Even if their finances are fine and they still have spare time, most folks don't want a second job with a second source of deadlines and stress etc. And if a for-profit giant sees their project and offers them a LOT of money to stop working on it, most folks will say yes -- even if they were making decent money already.
Not really, it will also redistribute wealth.
Let's say I have $1000 and you have $100. If we get additional $100 each, your purchasing power would now be 2/11 of mine instead of 1/10, even with prices adjusted for inflation.
I'm not advocating for UBI though – stronger economy is the more sustainable solution here.
Do you really see it going another way? Taking money from people through force just distributes it back to the people that get the handouts.. eg. Inflation.
I suspect you’re mistaking commercial companies pretending to be doing open source with actual community-driven open source.
I assume your time also has value. Open source software does not have to be shared free of charge, especially not when you need to invest your time and money to package and distribute the software and offer support for the project. The kind of puritan definition of open source that you're alluding to is only playing into the hands of the megacorps that are exploiting their users.
People deserve to be compensated for their work, especially when their work finds an active audience, even if they maintain an open source project.
Also, while open source definitely needs some funding, it can become badly harmed by too much of it, when code becomes developed purely for money and not for the usual ESR’s open source incentives.
As for the problem with a paid version - it's because when it happens, shortly afterwards the free version starts to rot. Monetisation might be good for the owner, but it's almost always terrible to user experience.
If I'm not mistaken, they were publishing the exact same version on both app stores, and the apps could be purchased or some of the features were put behind in-app purchases on Google Play. This is a reasonable funding model that has allowed many open source apps to thrive, though in this developer's case maybe it did not meet their needs.
"Leopard eats face" is a dumb reddit thought-terminating cliche. I invite you to actually think about the problem and ask yourself why developers of FOSS tools selling out happens in some domains but not others, and effects some users without warning but not others.
Money always ends up in the equation when you have to invest years of your life maintaining and supporting a project. And that's perfectly fine and healthy, because it means you can find a path that does not result in either side being exploited.
As for your last point, I was not responding to developers selling out their users, which is unfortunate, but to the expectation to not have a premium/paid version of a software project distributed. I think the developer even shared the pro version for free on F-Droid (OsmAnd does the same), yet the existence of a paid version was regarded as something negative by the user above.
If you're uncomfortable with the taught of you or at least someone else funding the development of the software you use, you're only setting yourself up to be exploited.
Another aspect of leopard territory is API churn. On Android and to a lesser extent browser extensions, regular rebuilds are necessary to keep the application up to date. This sometimes necessitates reworking parts of the application, not just rebuilding it. This recurring chore places a constant burden on developers, they can't "finish" an application then forget about it and move on with their lives; doing so would see their work vanish. On the other hand, on GNU/Linux desktops it's perfectly feasible to "finish" an application and leave it unmaintained for 15 years, people will still be able to use it. And on Android with F-Droid, most of the burden of rebuilding applications to keep them running is taken on by F-Droid volunteers, reducing the burnout pressure on application developers.
The conclusion is simple: Strict separation of the developer and packager/distributor roles keeps the leopard away.
Oh no, only if it buildable from source. Binary compitability in Desktop Linux is non-existant, even Linus Tovarldis has ranted about this in the past. Even source is not immune to rot, if no maintainer steps up, nobody will package it, and god forbid the application uses something like QT4, while the distro decides to drop QT4 altogether...
It's regrettable that the funding model of these projects did not work out, and that the developer sold these apps without informing users about the change of ownership.
Though it feels like at this point we are bargaining for the amount of free work we are expected to get from this person, while sneering at the prospect of there being a paid version of the app published on Google Play as part of the original funding model that was in place long before the sale.
Announcement: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
Glad their is a fork. I don't use other apps, they are either feature incomplete or not intuitive but gallery is solid 10.
Hope we can maintain the fork
https://www.simplemobiletools.com/blog/how-much-does-your-da...
Speedometer: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.digitalspe...
Material Status Bar: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.treydev.ms...
Both of which have and I know this sounds insane, contain a $16 a week subscription fee.
[0]: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu... [1]: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
The sad reality is that Mozilla once did all these things, but lack of funding meant that many efforts were eventually discontinued. As great as Mozilla is, they too are effectively 'captured' due to their reliance on Google funding. Firefox is the only browser that doesn't support installing PWAs, which is unbelievable, and almost certainly a move made to please Google.
The small creators are the ones facing financial pressure and difficult decisions... and that's when you snap up their products.
https://github.com/sponsors/naveensingh/
A good way to avoid this kind of thing is to sponsor the open source software you use regularly.
My personal rule is if I use something every day I should sponsor it.
If that doesn’t happen, it means they weren’t an open source project, but a commercial one with an open repo, and so weren’t sustainable anyway.