Also @shrugal@lemmy.world.
the connecting with a majority of people using the same closed source platform
The platform is open, including the part that connects to other closed source platforms. It’s just Matrix and open source bridges after all. And making the client app closed souce doesn’t help with any of that.
I’m sorry if I’m a bit pedantic about this, but it seems like you’re describing an upside to closed source software that’s just not there.
You’re definitely right that people are a bit too doom-and-gloom about it, Beeper did do a lot of good over the last few years!
But I also find it a bit odd that they talk so much about the importance of open source in messaging, and then release a closed source client without at least adressing the topic. Add the fact that they’ve been aquired by another company on the same day, and it starts to smell like another instance of openwashing.
Idk, we’ll have to see how it plays out I guess.
I can answer that: it’s the “I don’t care about security as long as I can send memes and inappropriate messages to most people” experience.
Closed source doesn’t help with that though, you don’t have to care about privacy in open source.
except you do know that the bridges are decrypting all messages anyway
They are working on on-device bridges that preserve e2ee, but making the client closed source kind of defeats the purpose here.
The thing is, we are talking about the Beeper service here. Yes Matrix is good, yes Beeper bridges are good, but a closed source Beeper app is bad. That’s what the criticism is about, and it doesn’t help if you deflect that by arguing about all the other things they are doing or that no one is forced to install it.
That’s not the point. An app doesn’t become good because you can just not use it.
What is this “closed source experience” you are talking about? How would making the client open source hinder that in any way, especially when their stated goal is to earn money with premium features instead of the app itself?!
Imo being open source is a VERY big deal for an e2e encrypted chat client! I don’t really care whether most of their stack is open if the app I’m actually using to type and encrypt my messages is not. This makes the whole thing look like a trick, pretending to be open when key parts are not.
This is not applicable here, since Beeper is “just” Matrix + Bridges + Simplified UX!
A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don’t think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.
Because everyone knows not getting updates is great for the “security and privacy” Apple claims to care so much about!
It gets a bit more complicated than that when it comes to antitrust law.
They can ask users if they want that, I’m sure many of their users do. What they shouldn’t do is force people to accept their version of “security and privacy”.
“If [the] digital Euro can also be used for tax payments etc and general acceptance is mandated, a significant amount of their clients could do their full finances with the digital Euro and won’t need an account with a commercial bank anymore,” German cooperative bank lobbyists warned the Commission in one of the documents.
Imagine “warning” them that their idea could have the desired effect!
Ok so, if you’re not willing or able to separate different ideas and concepts, then this discussion makes little sense imo. Drowning a very specific question in your ideology is not the way to actually get a good and truthful answer.
Thanks anyway for your time and effort, have a good one!
hard disagree. we have to examine things as they exist in the real world, not as we would like them to be.
I don’t get why you keep trying to spin this as some sort of fairytail. Separating different things to figure out their role in an overall system is a completely normal and useful thing to do. If your car is broken you don’t just throw it on the scrap yard, or even declare cars in general non-functional. You look inside and figure out which part is the problem. And you can attribute the failure of the car to one part and declare the others functional, even if you’d never see those parts driving alone on the highway (although I gave you examples of that for rent). This is not a matter of facts vs fiction, this is about keeping separate things separate and not mixing things up, correlation vs causation and stuff.
also disagree. why are these university students renting? schools could be providing housing to students if we invested public funds into that kind of project […]
That’s not an argument against rent, that’s an argument against students having different means and having to pay for things in general. Why do students have to pay for food themselves? Why do they have to do their own house work when others can afford to hire someone? Those are all good questions, but they only concern rent in so far as it’s also a thing people pay money for.
lets just go through this […]
There is so much wrong with this that I don’t even know where to begin.
Resources are not always limited, not in an economic sense. If there are more houses than people wanting to live in them then houses are essentially “unlimited”, in the sense that you’d probably need to pay someone to take it off your hands. Owning a house also has costs attached to it, and you’d probably have a hard time covering those costs with earnings from rent in this case. People owning property in places no one wants to live in can attest to that.
Rent doesn’t require private ownership. Property can be owned and rented out by public entities, and that’s actually pretty common.
The rest is a gross oversimplyfication of the matter, as well as a logical error. You argue that X is in the equation, X requires private property, ergo private property is the problem. That’s just wrong, or at least not compelling. As an example, burglars require air to live, but the problem of burglaries cannot simply be reduced to the existence of air.
And uhm … the universe is infinite as far as we know, but that’s another discussion entirely.
this is a problem of terminology
Ok, could be that we mean the same thing. I personally think that a certain level of private ownership is necessary in order to establish responsibilities and solve disputes. E.g. if I own my house then I get to decide what to do with it, but I also have to be the one to take care of it. That might be what you’re calling personal ownership, while I’d just say that’s private ownership within healthy limits.
rent doesn’t exist in principle, it exists in practice. and in practice, the history of rent is a history of wealth extraction
This is a completely useless stance when you want to figure out if rent itself is morally good or bad.
There are a lot of instances of rent today that are completely fine. For example, my parents rent 2 rooms of their appartement to university students, and they just ask for a share of the costs they have, proportional to the size of the rooms. That is rent, but free of other influences like profit maximization, and all parties seem to be very happy with the arrangement. Or if you rent a tool or car from a local company, you’ll pay mostly for a share of the acquisition and repair costs, and a bit on top so the owners and employees of the company can keep the lights on. There is absolutely nothing wrong about this form of rent.
If you’re saying that rent + limited supply + capitalistic profit maximation + corruption is a problem, then I absolutely agree with you, but it would be false to blame that on the rent part of that equation. And I would definitely not go as far as saying that private property in general is bad, expecially not very limited private ownership like a person owning the house they live in or part of the company they work for. Too much concentration of ownership is a problem, not the concept of ownership itself.
I’m talking about rent in principle, not how it is often perverted today. You can make just about anything immoral if you add price gauging and not-fulfilling-contractual-obligations to it. There are a lot of rents with fair prices, e.g. almost everything that’s not housing, but also apartments from social housing or housing associations.
Because of the sentence before the one you quoted. I’m sorry, but this is getting silly.
And you are accusing me of not properly supporting my claims??
This is going into feasability and away from morality, but ok.
The law is the “mutually agreed contract”, and the usage created the dept. You can be expected to know that the design of a bridge might be copyrighted, you can’t be expected to know that a bridge is private property and crossing it requires a fee. Ergo it’s on you to contact the owner of the design, and it’s on you to collect a fee from people using your bridge if that is what you want to do.
Nothing about what you just wrote has anything to do with closed source software though. You could just as well say that closed source helps them predict the future or draw shinier unicorns. It doesn’t!
Maybe you mean tightly coupled, stripped-down, preconfigured or vertically integrated, but you can do that just as well with open source software. No one is forcing them to make a general purpose chat app or offer the ability to choose a different server. It’s just a matter of being able to see, verify and modify the code.
This is the only thing that comes close imo. But they stated specifically that they don’t want to make money with the chat app itself, so it doesn’t really work as a justification. They could easily offer server-side premium features or create a closed source premium-only version or extension, it’s no reason to make the base app closed source.
They don’t have to do that, and they don’t afaik. Matrix itself can do proper e2ee just fine, and Beeper is pretty open about the fact that bridges hosted by them have to break e2ee to translate between platforms. They’d only need theater if their closed source app actually has some bad code in it, which is kind of my point.
Again: Their Matrix server and bridges are open source right now, and it wouldn’t stop them from doing what you’re describing.
I just can’t help it. 😜