Purism Plans To Expand & Offer Ethical Subscription Services

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Plans To Expand & Offer Ethical Subscription Services

If the folks at Purism weren't busy enough working on their Librem 5 Linux smartphone initiative and adjoining projects like creating a new software app store, they also are eyeing an entrance into offering "ethical" subscription services and ultimately expand into other areas...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Purism-Ethical-Services-Expand

[tildearrow]

Great. Yesterday I got my last contact in Hangouts to provide me an alternate contact method, so now I can get rid of Google for good.

[Girolamo_Cavazzoni]

Ungoogled since early 2016 and never been happier.

[wizard69]

Sadly what does Ethical mean in the context of services? It’s the people running these programs that have ethical problems not so much the “service”. A change of leadership at Purism would instantly destroy what they are trying to achieve.

[Michael_S]

The much bigger problem is that most of the people we interact with are still tied into Google, Facebook, etc... I host my own email with mailinabox.email, it's not that hard. But everyone I correspond with uses GMail, so I see fewer ads but get no real privacy benefit. Likewise my parents, siblings, cousins, children, coworkers, and friends either don't use social networking software or use Facebook and Twitter. I enjoy the conversations I see on Mastodon, but I want something that connects me to my loved ones, not just cool strangers.

Sadly what does Ethical mean in the context of services? It’s the people running these programs that have ethical problems not so much the “service”. A change of leadership at Purism would instantly destroy what they are trying to achieve.

Well, if the software is 100% open source (free software), then as soon as Purism or any other company does something unethical the users can move to competing services or create their own. It's not ideal, because most people lack the skill and interest to run their own. But it's better than what we have now, right?

[jacob]

Sadly what does Ethical mean in the context of services? It’s the people running these programs that have ethical problems not so much the “service”. A change of leadership at Purism would instantly destroy what they are trying to achieve.

I agree. An ethical approach is to deliver software, not "services".

[eydee]

This phone runs Linux, right? So why make an app store and limit it to Java/Mono applets instead of making a program store, and let users run native stuff? Is this phone so ultra powerful that running an interpreter doesn't matter? Even then, the number of available applets is unlikely to be large. And the lack of freedom of choice seems to go against the very purpose of this project.

[Serafean]

I agree. An ethical approach is to deliver software, not "services".

Yes and no. What you can do is deliver software, along with hardware.
Imagine this product: "Your own personal cloud". What it could mean in practice is that you buy a box, plug it into your internet, get a domain name, set up a few things, and have everything self hosted.
Why do I imagine this? Because I've built a couple of such things. For myself and for friends.

[Guest]

Sadly what does Ethical mean in the context of services? It’s the people running these programs that have ethical problems not so much the “service”. A change of leadership at Purism would instantly destroy what they are trying to achieve.

I assume by ethical they mean not charging monthly for software that's installed on your machine, aka. the Adobe CC and Office 365 model.

[Michael_S]

I agree. An ethical approach is to deliver software, not "services".

There are services like NextCloud or Sandstorm.io which offer completely open source software you can host yourself, or you can pay them to host it for you. I'm satisfied with that model.

There's also Gitlab, which offers many services in the open source version and a few extra in the hosted version. I dislike that, but I respect that they can't get enough support to fund full time development with a fully open model. I wish it were different, though.