Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I’m talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life’s work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn’t change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond “you can look at source code to see if there’s bugs or spyware in it.” There’s a reason “Stallman was right” is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I’m not convinced he’s as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said “he defended Jeffrey Epstein” or “he blamed Epstein’s victim” or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about “voluntary pedophilia” is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don’t think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he “pulled rank” and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the “joke” isn’t actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government “global gag rule” suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he’s done more good than harm to the world, however, I’m not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term “Stallmanism” would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

To be clear, it used to be fully free software, then became proprietary for a little while, and then as of 17 June 2024 it became free again. So the most recent release 11.15.0 (from two days ago) is fully free, but the previous one isn’t.

If Termux is an option then wget can do this. wget -i <file> reads a list of URLs from <file>. wget -i - reads a list of URLs from standard in.

Note that Termux comes with a wget command from busybox that doesn’t have this option, so you’d need the full GNU Wget which can be installed by pkg install wget

“Privacy centric” is irrelevant because because this is the free software movement, not the privacy movement (also, this is not reddit, we have a higher standard of conduct here).

Further reading on free software philosophy. Most relevant is why software should not have owners (1994) as this is fundamentally where FUTO disagrees with the open source/free software movement.

I also made a prior comment here about the fundamental difference between “fauxpen source” licenses like FUTO’s and real FOSS licenses. You seem to characterize it as “stealing code and profiting off it” but the strength of free software is in collaboration and community, not so much competition, so sharing is considered a virtue here. I talked more about it here in a reddit comment referencing my previous lemmy comment.

This will probably be my last comment on FUTO/Grayjay in this thread, since I’ve said all I intend to say several times here and on reddit. I might make a master post about the problems of fauxpen source at some point.

I don’t have any opinion on grayjay but this is the open source community and grayjay is proprietary. That’s the only reason I downvoted your comment

Feel free to use it if it works for you but I think it’s poor form to advertise proprietary products in a thread about a free software project.

My guess (and it’s only a guess, I haven’t looked at the source code) is that the scraping is being done on a server end that they can update without having to push an app update.

edit: my guess was wrong, I found where the source code is and they do the parsing locally - however it’s a plugin that I assume gets loaded in on app start so they can still update it without having to publish a new apk. this is the fix

interestingly although Grayjay itself is proprietary this plugin is Affero GPL licensed.

Vivaldi’s target audience is people who don’t mind proprietary blobs as long as they are “good” or make things “work better.” Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.

Icedove (Thunderbird) works well enough for me. Maybe the reason it’s “old fashioned” is because it works well enough that it doesn’t need to be changed that often.

In the proprietary software world we’re used to UI’s being redesigned on a regular basis for no user benefit.

AFAIK FUTO/Rossmann, to their credit, stopped trying to openwash themselves. They created their own phrase “source-first” to describe their proprietary EULA.

That doesn’t change the fact that it’s proprietary and not worth promoting here.