Google Used Free Software to Build a Monopoly. Now Google Kicks Free Software to the Curb
“Don’t remove the ladder once you done with it. Leave it for others to climb too” ― Lazarus Takawira, Imagine Africa
F-Droid has made a statement [1] about something we wrote about last month. It has since been mentioned by LWN [2] and The Register MS [3].
The statement speaks for itself. Google is waging (yet another) war on Software Freedom or one's right to run one's programs of choice.
As usual, they pretend this has something to do with "security" (even if they put surveillance back doors in Android).
The "G" in "Google" does not stand for GNU. It never did. It's just another greedy company. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree
For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When contrasted with the commercial app stores — of which the Google Play store is the most prominent — the differences are stark: they are hotbeds of spyware and scams, blatantly promoting apps that prey on their users through attempts to monetize their attention and mine their intimate information through any means necessary, including trickery and dark patterns.
F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been validated to work for the user’s interests, rather than for the interests of the app’s distributors. The way F-Droid works is simple: when a developer creates an app and hosts the source code publicly somewhere, the F-Droid team reviews it, inspecting it to ensure that it is completely open source and contains no undocumented anti-features such as advertisements or trackers. Once it passes inspection, the F-Droid build service compiles and packages the app to make it ready for distribution. The package is then signed either with F-Droid’s cryptographic key, or, if the build is reproducible, enables distribution using the original developer’s private key. In this way, users can trust that any app distributed through F-Droid is the one that was built from the specified source code and has not been tampered with.
Do you want a weather app that doesn’t transmit your every movement to a shadowy data broker? Or a scheduling assistant that doesn’t siphon your intimate details into an advertisement network? F-Droid has your back. Just as sunlight is the best disinfectant against corruption, open source is the best defense against software acting against the interests of the user.
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F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree
The F-Droid project has posted an urgent message regarding Google's plan to require developer registration to install apps on Android devices.
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Google's dev registration plan 'will end the F-Droid project
Last month, Google said that from next year, but with a gradual rollout, Android certified devices will only install apps that are registered by verified developers, even when sideloaded, meaning that they are installed from a source other than the official Play store.
In a post today Prud'hommeaux said that Google's planned changes are incompatible with F-Droid. "The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot 'take over' the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications," he said.
"If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open source app distribution sources as we know them today," said Prud'hommeaux.
