Hello,

I would just like to ramble about a few things in the free world. One thing that I think I disagree with many of you on is writing for iOS. Back when when rms gave his AMA, he had a gran idea: develop apps for cydia or whatever and only offer your app to encourage others to jailbreak. I very much support this tactic; if someone somehow managed to write a truly killer app offered this way, it could have wonderful consequences.

On the other hand, I've had a growing thought for a while now. I've been thinking that, all things being equal, we have an obligation to provide these poor trapped folks with free apps. The reason is because they don't know what they're getting anyway, so the least we can do is provide them apps that we know aren't malicious. In the absense of the four freedoms, I think we have a moral obligation to provide something better; if everyone is out selling handcuffs, we might as well pairs that don't lock.

One of the reasons I thought of this is because I read iOS now offers custom keyboards and my first thought was fuck, now begins an era of serious keylogger spying and ad trafficking. Who knows how bad it already is, ya know? But anyway, I thought that we as the free software community have an obligation to throw these folks a life vest. No, they can't trust us any more than existing devs but like I said, all things being equal we know we aren't screwing them over, and they deserve software that respects then, to be rescued in a sense.

That took longer to write than I thought. I had also wanted to talk about my objection to dismissing a "technical" question like whether a system should use systemd or whatever. I think this is a mistake because all of those decisions exist within a framework. The authors of software might make certain decisions and those might have everything to do with that project (sysd, etc.) or other projects. Purely technical decisions may have political consequences. Who gets funding is part of that and I think it is crucial which packages we pick to be included in any system or collection. Being a prominent package in a prominent distro might mean attracting more people to other places, etc. We fail to see these contexts at our peril.

I've got some other stuff floating around too, if anyone is interestded in debating these ideas I think the community could really use it. Also, sorry for any errors, I'm running mobile.

Cheers!