beyond

This article is clearly about beans, not onions.

Sure if your hardware works to your satisfaction with it. The only way to know is to try it yourself. You can test it with a Trisquel liveusb.

I run my instance so I am perfectly happy with the level of censorship.

Said instance is narrowly focused on free software and free culture issues, so unrelated politics would be off-topic. That said there is a fairly bog standard code of conduct prohibiting bigotry, nazism and the like.

The situation has been resolved.

https://github.com/orgs/organicmaps/discussions/9837#discussioncomment-11568667

Codium is fine and technically FOSS although it’s association with Microsoft taints it for anyone who still hates MS from the bad old days.

"New" Microsoft isn't really any better, and although Codium itself is perfectly fine (Electron notwithstanding) many of Microsoft's extensions only work with/are only licensed for the official VSCode build and include proprietary parts.

One of my professors said you don’t need an IDE, the Linux system already is a development environment.

Considering "the Linux system" is literally anything you throw on top of the kernel called Linux, it can be a development environment or anything you want it to be. But I think part of the appeal of an IDE is how all the parts integrate (the "I" in "IDE") so a bunch of packages thrown together might not provide the same cohesive feeling.

Supposedly the version on Github releases doesn't have the Google libraries.

https://github.com/eszdman/PhotonCamera/issues/109

Still, I would wait until this app is in F-Droid before considering it. It includes some other libraries of unknown source.

https://github.com/eszdman/PhotonCamera/issues/46

This - cathedral style development absolutely is a valid way to create free software and I don't believe Eric S. Raymond (the guy who, I believe, coined the term) claimed otherwise, only that the bazaar model was "better." Maintaining a bazaar style project is work, and it's work that easily leads to burnout. We should normalize the idea that you don't need to commit to being an "open source maintainer" to release a free software project; it should be enough to just release the source code (with or without binaries).

It should be noted that this is not the source code to the application itself, but rather a backend server used by the application. The application proper remains under a free software license.

However, the fact that this server (which as far as I know is a required dependency of the application) was kept secret (albeit under a free software license) is troubling, and I don't understand how Alexander can justify removing this license given he is not the sole contributor to this repository. It's also strange that he reprimanded Roman for "making decisions alone" when the decision to remove the license was made by Alexander alone.

Why does it need to be proprietary?

From my point of view switching from a proprietary application to a free application is always a gain. You can't control what other people use, but you can take steps to reclaim your own freedom and control.

It's unfortunate there's no way to use RCS from a free application, though.

But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it'll be just like any dumb device.

Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can't even do that.