Proton picks up Standard Notes to deepen its pro-privacy portfolio | TechCrunch
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By adding Standard Notes to its portfolio of apps, Proton will deepen its reach with an engaged community of pro-privacy users.

Proton said the Standard Notes app, which is available for both mobile and desktop, will remain “open source, freely available and fully supported”.

It also suggested that there will be no change to Standard Notes’ prices; its press release specifies that existing five-year subscriptions “will continue to be honored.”

“Standard Notes will remain an independent product and in due course both companies will open access to their products to each others’ users,” Proton added.

  • drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    6 months ago

    Chromium and AOSP are not good examples for what you’re saying. Both Chromium and Android have thriving ecosystems of forks and alternatives based on them. Built on the work that Google is doing with them. So I really don’t think those are good examples of applications that aren’t healthy because you can just use a fork.

    Yes, Google controls upstream, but there’s no reason why you can’t use downstream.As you said, it puts maintenance burden on the forks, but people are willing to do that. That’s the thing.

    EDIT: This is my off account, So, unfortunately, you’ll have to take my word for it, but I did used to be part of an Android ROM team in the past and still do Android work private sector today.

    • Ashelyn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      6 months ago

      Perhaps they are bad examples, but my point was more that I think those ecosystems thrive in spite of the company that owns the upstream at this point more than because of it. They did tremendously useful work getting the projects off the ground but it ostensibly seems like they get in the way more often than not; that said, I haven’t done any open source work on either of the two. I’d be interested to hear your take, I could be pretty far off the mark.

      Honestly my main examples I’d point to right now are situations like manifest V3 and Android nitpicks like the recent Bluetooth 2-tap change; don’t get me wrong, they are easy to fork and have thriving ecosystems in terms of volunteer dedication, but those forks still primarily targeted towards technical users (with some exceptions) and companies selling devices like the Freedom Phone (and other, actually neat, useful, properly privacy focused devices which is awesome!). By far, however, most users are on the upstream branch due to “default choice” psychology and have to deal with the bullshit that’s increasingly integrated into the proprietary elements that Google seems to be making harder and harder to separate from the open source ones. I suppose that’s why education and getting the word out are all the more important though.

      Could be the sensationalist end of the tech news cycle getting me spun up on an overall inaccurate view of things.

      There is also the point I have to raise that security update support is always a very valuable asset that can be worth dealing with some downsides to get ahold of. I’m hoping a lot of those can be pulled into open source projects on more of a piecemeal basis where applicable?

      I’d be happy to be proven wrong about my rudimentary assessment. I have enough things to be doomer about and honestly it would be nice to have one or two fewer!