CEO will come out and say employees are more productive when forced to work 5 days a week. When asked to see the data, they will say trust me, I’ve seen the internal studies from a Big Tech company. Same exact playbook as work from home.

Most interesting would be a forced sell of Android. Would all of the Google spyware be stripped out of Google’s Android distribution? Would we see more official distributions of Android without any Google software?

I would say it is one sided in that the user gets the same treatment/experience from either platform even though they are consider rivals and each company would argue they are different.

I would say iOS and Android.

Originally they were pretty different in terms of functionality and appearance. Android has improved a lot in terms of the user experience and UI, but also has become more locked down and user hostile. I would say that iOS has actually gotten worse in terms of bugs/reliability, and now Apple is relying on services and ads for new revenue. The user experience has suffered.

If you want a mobile phone/OS that respects user freedoms, agency and privacy, there is no consumer option. Both are filled with spyware/data collection from both the OS vendor and third party apps.

On iOS I’m using OutRun. It provides basic activity tracking, which is what I care about. I don’t need a social network.

It’s open source: https://github.com/timfraedrich/OutRun

I wonder if they will implement the same malicious compliance as they did in the EU with the junk core technology fees and notarization requirements.

I believe Valve just has a flat hierarchy, but not worker owned.

https://tech-coops.xyz/ seems to have a list of companies.

One answer to capitalist companies seeking to maximize profit at all costs are worker owned companies. When the workers are in control of the business decisions, they won’t vote for the decisions going against themselves.

Sadly, I don’t know that many worked owned tech companies. One example is https://www.igalia.com/

If more people would be willing to start work owned companies rather than your typical capitalist startup, we could have more options.

For macOS and iOS development I use Xcode (don’t really have another choice), but otherwise I am using Kate. Kate has support for macOS and Windows in addition to Linux.

I’m not touching VSCode, I don’t want to use an electron app as a code editor, nor want to use something with Microsoft spyware and propriety plugins.

Strange, Big Tech has no inherit right to operate in foreign markets. If they want to be in those markets, they need to pay their fair share. I would be glad to see them pull out of those markets, but that won’t easily happen.

Mobile apps are also loaded with third party ad and spyware frameworks which bloats up the size.

No mention of Framework at all in the article

Not for sure exactly, maybe there are some details on the forums?

https://www.oldunreal.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=4969

While not open source, OldUnreal has taken over Unreal and Unreal Tournament with access to the source code and they release patches. The OldUnreal team has an agreement with Epic to do this.

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

I was actually trying to do some research on this as well to verify my claim, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. I’m not for sure whether uBlock blocks complete JavaScript libraries from loading by default or if it is only blocks the HTTP request like PiHole.

I did find this interesting project by DuckDuckGo which provides empty implementations of the JavaScript libraries when adblockers break the site. This seems to imply that some adblockers do prevent the JavaScript library from loading at all.

https://github.com/duckduckgo/tracker-surrogates

uBlock Origin just prevents the network requests from these tracking frameworks from completing. All the javascript tracking code I believe still executes, just doesn’t return.

If it were possible it would be great to prevent these javascript frameworks from being loaded at all by the browser. But I guess the website javascript code would break.

It would be interesting to replace the tracking frameworks with an empty stubbed out implementation that does nothing. Not for sure how feasible that would be.

It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.

Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.

This also impacts emulators and other re-implementations of proprietary systems. This allows Nintendo to threaten emulator devs and make it illegal to decrypt DRM encrypted games, media, or apps you legally purchased.

Proprietary software is also really dogmatic. Steve Jobs famously didn’t support flash on the iPhone, there also was no direct access to files/file system in the UI for a very long time. Tim Cook told someone’s Mom to just buy an iPhone to access iMessage. There’s too many user hostile dogmatic positions from Apple.

I think this has nothing to do with open source vs proprietary, but rather specific individuals having power/control over the software to force specific decisions.