Free and Open Source Software

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If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

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Ethical, easy-to-use and privacy-conscious alternatives to well-known software (switching.software)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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A great resource that makes it quick and easy to find alternatives to Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe and many more.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

As others have mentioned there is little in the way of justification for these suggestions, and while I happen to agree with plenty of them, I’d personally like to see more reasoning, if not to appease people that already have opinions then to help newer users understand their options.

Indeed. In fact it’s actually worse than you describe. Swiso witholds negative information. They don’t want to inform people. They want to steer people. For example, swiso’s endorsements for donation platforms have some quite serious problems:

https://codeberg.org/swiso/website/issues/141

swiso is also aware of the serious issues with Qwant and the serious issues with DuckDuckGo. Not only failing to remove them but also failing to inform. Qwant and DDG are both Microsoft syndicates!

(if anyone is interested, one of the most privacy-respecting search services is Ombrelo¹, which is largely unknown to the world because PTIO, swiso, and prism-break don’t do the job they claim to do)

And swiso is aware because that’s their bug tracker.

/cc @[email protected]

¹ https://ombrelo.im5wixghmfmt7gf7wb4xrgdm6byx2gj26zn47da6nwo7xvybgxnqryid.onion/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Thanks so much for all the additional info. The inclusion of donation based platforms and some products that are just degrees of removal from big corps rather than totally free of them were some my primary concerns. Thanks for all the details!

Also how can you have a section on books and library access without mentioning Libby is a shame. The apps carries so much weight as far as bridging the gap between public libraries and primarily digital customers.