F-Droid needs to be audited to make sure no backdoors have been installed. Otherwise funding FOSS is one of the few good things any government can do.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Noob question: are tye people saying "gov funding = NSA" mostly American?
I swear this community is as bad as a flat earth one when the government gets brought up. why change the title from the original to imply that congress (other than deciding the federal budget) had anything to do with it? That is at best irresponsible and misleading and at worst actively malicious. Yes government entities do sketchy things, but that does not mean something can't be trusted because a government entity interacted with it.
Whatever fed 😉
Well said. And I think there's more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.
Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people's will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it's similar in German.
I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.
I understand that "Regierung" (government) = executive branch "Parlament" (parliament, in the US congress+senate) = legislative branch
"Staat" (state) is an imprecise word as it can mean different things https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staat https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity) (see Definition)
Huz-fucking-zah. Independence from corporations like Google in the technologies we depend on is important, and F-Droid provides an unmatched service in support of that goal.
Do they also have a warrant canary?
I don't consider those to be useful anymore because a court can compel them to keep the canary up in secret, and I'm pretty sure that's already happened more than once before.
That's never happened in history
How would you know?
You probably wouldn't have heard about it simply because it's illegal to publicize a secret subpoena/warrant. Such orders are given as National Security Letters with a permanent gag order, going so far as to preventing the recipient from even seeking counsel; it's a massive abuse of power and due process in the US.
Oh no, I're received funding (welfare) from the governemnt, guess I'm a CIA asset now... 🤷♂️
/s
Cool
I mean, Fdroid has problems but funding from government is the absolute least of them.
Depends what the funding is for. If it’s payment for compliance with CALEA (which has become a major revenue stream for big tech), then it’s compensation for building backdoors.
Original title was "F-Droid Awarded Open Technology Fund's FOSS Sustainability Grant". Not trying to be tinfoily but I thought it would have been even more irresponsible to not make it clear where the money really comes from as I think most people aren't aware.
Either way, please do your own research and draw your own conclusions and I promise I have no intentional agenda in reporting this.
I don't think your edited title is that clarifying, and in fact, muddies the water by glossing over some key details. Chiefly, Congress doesn't fund the OTF, they fund the US Agency for Global Media, which in turn uses some of their money to fund the nonprofit OTF; the OTF then uses their money to "support open technologies and communities that increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies," per their 501(c)3 non-profit mission statement.
OTF has its own board, and they operate independently from the government, though their operations are tied in a roundabout way to how Congress decides to allocate funding.
That F-Droid got a piece of that pie is a good thing, especially in light of the current regime and how they're basically giving the middle finger to Congress.
Yeah, the edited title is implied to be unburying the lede, but there was nothing being hidden by the original title.
I think you will find that almost all grants either come from a corporation or a government. Crazy isn't it? A very small amount comes from non-profits and often those nonprofits are majority funded by governments and corporations.
Why change the title??
Don't worry, it's libre software, we control it.
I want to share that My brain first interpretation from the title is that they are receiving money to do dirty things. And reasoning about it , Nothing to do with reality of course I didn't even read the article . End of message.
Thanks for this clarification. Certainly something to be aware of and pay attention to, but a little less instantly alarming than the OP title.