Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed with philosophy and history, secondarily obsessed with video games as a cultural medium. Also somewhat able to program.
Sounds like an easy way to do unproportional damage to projects with a bit of location spoofing.
I think that is utlimately valid - although I think the other options are all coming with their own problems. You will then have to instead live with the interests of tech corporations (including nonprofits who ultimately need funding) and advertisers collecting your data, whose interests will ultimately not be much less malignant - or small free software projects of a sometimes quite limited scope. The latter, I think, is also a valid niché, but will leave the overall standards of the internet to corporate interests.
Considering how the CEO here acts for Brave, in my opinion, this is not simply about him being an asshole or being politically questionable. To me - everything about him screams “grifter taking advantage of people’s legitimate concerns” - and he has a material interest in your data as well. Brave always felt to me like trying to sell and market privacy instead of proving to me, in their fundamentals, that they actually have my interests in mind.
Which is why I, personally, do not really understand choosing Brave above LibreWolf (or Tor Browse, occasionally), if privacy is your #1 priority.
Oh, yes, it wasn’t a direct answer, also, I’m not the person you answered to. Ultimately, my comment was more meant as an overall addition to the discussion, building on the idea of what a solution to:
Which I think is one of the big issues with OSS projects - many are based around a very small number of people being motivated to work on something for free. And it dies if that stops.
might be.
But as answers to your two points. #1 - I have no idea where they got that from, myself #2 - I think you answered that one yourself rather well, and I wanted to build on that one.
Sorry if that was confusing, my brain is also good at confusing myself at times, can’t imagine how that is for others at times.
I can somewhat understand the overall criticism, because Librewolf - as far as my understanding goes - would be in trouble without the work being done on the code upstream.
Personally, I know that this does not exist (yet), and to some people that put privacy above everything else with a more libertarian slant, this might sound like the worst option imaginable, but my “dream” way to handle it within the current economic system would be:
Have an open source, FOSS base, web-engine and all, developed with public funds similar to public broadcasting in many countries (Bonus if carried by international organisations instead of just national. Think a UN institution like UNESCO or WHO, but focused on making the internet accessible neutrally and to all). On top of that code, projects that want to put privacy above all else could still feasibly built projects like LibreWolf (an even Brave), relying somewhat comfortably on secure fundamentals.
I know, sounds like a dream, which it is at this point. But every other solution within the current economic status quo I personally thin of, I see no chance of enshittification not always encroaching and creating crises, if not outright taking over.
Another classic:
So, a few years back, when a good friend of mine tried out Linux mint, one of the main reasons he didn’t stick with it wasn’t even compatibility or anything (although he probably would have switched to a rolling release as someone who values cutting edge updates). But what ultimately made him return to Windows was something, I have been scratching my head on how to best handle it: The file system structure ultimately being too much of a change.
Now, of course, if you are used to it, I wouldn’t really call it better or worse - definitely more suited to what Linux ultimately is. But stuff like, “Where are the save games of my paradox games? Why is so much stuff in my user directory? Why is there no unified directoy for all the stuff I installed (including everything they use), like Program Files, but everything is scattered all around into different directories? Why was the path to my save games hidden in a dotfile-folder?” were examples of hurdles, where the current answer seems to be “you just have to get used to it”.
Now, I am not pleading to change the standard, there’s good reasons for it. But are there good transitioning guides from Windows to Linux, that do a good job at explaining the structure of the file system? Because I remember, myself, only really getting used to it months into my Linux journey all those years ago.
This is accurate, am consuming RISC V (news) for the emotional high, temporary bursts of irrational hope and am addicted.