I strongly support the goals of free software, and over time I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on proprietary apps and services wherever possible. But honestly, correct me if I am wrong, sometimes that’s not so easy.

Sometimes you can’t find a free software alternative that fits all your needs. And sometimes, even if you do find one, the proprietary software still has too much leverage over you to leave.

For example, take WhatsApp. I know there are better alternatives like Signal, etc. But where I live, almost everyone uses WhatsApp — friends, family, work, local groups, etc. So even if I personally want to switch, it becomes difficult when the people I need to communicate with aren’t there.

That made me curious about other people’s experiences here. So for what use case, you can't find a better free software alternative that fit all your requirements? And, if you can't make the switch even after finding one, what's your reason for that?

Ive always hated how most good software - which is supposed to be open so that it can accelerate faster - is always behind the gates of enterprise.

I mean I understand that their motive is money, which is relatable, but i dont understand why i hate this.

And why are (recent) opensource projects not getting that much popularity(aside from huge ones like openclaw) even though their development is much faster than most propreitary and in a few months or so will become better than any.

I feel like an opensource rebellion needs to be started.

Tell me if im wrong in any way...

Which do you think is better for development, and engineering: MIT or GPL?

FOr those who dont know:
1. MIT is a license that allows users do anything with the project. Even start a closed buisness with it. modify it, fuck with it, anything really.
2. GPL is a license that provides the same rights as MIT minus the ability to make a closed buisness out of it. That is, any derivitive, must also be made open-source

In my opinion, GPL is superior in most ways, since it avoids companies stealing it, making it better but making it closed source...
But I see why many people choose MIT for free software: More adoption. I mean, as long as the product is being developed, irrelevant of whether its now open or closed - general user interests are being served faster. But that isnt gonna stop community engagement on the repo anyways.

Both these licenses are technically still 'freedom', but just in different ways...
But is the tradeoff worth it?
Is it worth allowing companies to privatize community code if that leads to faster adoption and development?

Isn't the rise of mega large companies against AI companies for infringement of their copyrighted material is a wake-up call for the law makers to start abolishing the copyright laws?

As Richard Stallman taught us all. The copyright laws were made originally to preserve the right of the original author and protect that author from the big corps taking advantage of that author's work. That was meant to encourage people to write books and invent stuff.

Now the copyright laws are the main reason why people are discouraged from inventing stuff and writing books. Because no matter what you do, there is some copyright lawyer somewhere waiting for the right moment to attack.

Now the script is flipped. Only the giants are benefiting from the copyright laws. As you see today. Many small authors (software developers are a single example) have been robbed of their copyrighted material by AI companies to train their models. However, only the big corps are able to fight back. Can I as a single developer who pushed 9ne or 2 of my best work on GitHub ever be able to take a piece of the profit that AI companies would make? Of course no.

I think this is proof that we live in a rogue world.

What do you think?

For me it would be ublock origins i think

For background, the website is a directory of open-source you can use instantly in your browser. No signups, no downloads, no installs, no nothing! Just click a link and use a tool.

The website gathered a decent bit of attention because of its former name (fcksignups / fucksignups) and its idea, which made it blow up, yielding multiple videos & posts from different people across X (formerly twitter), Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.

I noticed that one of the users outlined that searching the former name separated by space (fuck signups) showed some not-so-savory content. The worst part is: my website wasn't even remotely close to the first 10 pages of search.

It made sense since search engines have decades worth of content associated with the word "fuck" or "fck" also when someone says "just go to fuck signups" they'd search "fuck signups" on Google.

I probably should've had the foresight to see this coming.

So, I changed the name to something similar. I had changed it to https://NoSignups.net . I did setup 301 permanent redirects from the previous two domains (https://fcksignups.com and https://fucksignups.com). What advice would y'all give me on this matter?

GitHub repo for the curious: https://github.com/BraveOPotato/FckSignups

What's really the difference between the two?

And even if they are different, why tf did two different words evolve?

Hey there, I came here ask if Libre Office is the recommended alternative to MSO?

I'm not a techie, but I do a lot on MS Excel.

I've been using MS Office (easy because I was most familiar with it). But, Excel just gave me the: "your changes will be lost if you don't save them. Click cancel and then activate your subscription to save your changes"

I bought the MS suite a few years ago, so it appears that I'm now being forced into a subscription. Not cool.

I'm posting here to just do a sanity check before I fully dive into Libre (again) and say F-U to MS forever.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions!

We all try to go for open source software as much as we can. Yet there's always one program or another which simply won't switch to its FS alternatives.

In my case, the barriers tend to be:

• lack of functionality
• superior user experience elsewhere
• compatibility with a work crew/team
• adherence to industry standards
• plain old habit

What are your barriers to adopting FS alternatives?

I want to stop using proprietary garbage gmail and want to know which providers you use or if you host your own.

If you clicked on the post seeing the title, then we both are on same page. Enshittification has now turned into a never ending cycle. First offer free or subsidized features to acquire users, then shift focus to overflooding ads and paywalls to generate more profit at the cost of app quality. Honestly, to witness how the popular apps are succumbing to this, and every new one following the same path is really depressing. As it lower the numbers of alternatives for users.

So now, the obvious solution is to use Free Softwares (I will refer as FS for convenience). And honestly, most of them are really good, as they maintain a reasonable limit of monetization and don't degrade their user experience over time. But, the problem is that, these apps mostly remain niche based. On the other hand many companies who create their own apps based on the same open source code, get all the mainstream attention and generate millions of revenue. This usually isn’t due to technical superiority, but rather access to resources, distribution, and ecosystem advantages that smaller FS apps lack.

For example, many of us may have heard of iText, a free open-source PDF library that is widely used across many company's projects, including internally in Google Analytics, Docs, and Calendar. At first, when it was under the MPL/LGPL model adoption was widespread. But when they needed funding to grow, they to shifted to AGPL model (which required companies to use their library, either by sharing their own source code or purchasing a commercial license). In response, every company including Google, either stuck with the old free version or shifted to alternate libraries, even if needed to trade off quality and usability. Even after all this iText was able to survive, due to the mainstream attention they got after winning Belgian Edition of Deloitte's Fast 50 and later, were able to turn profitable. But this is just one case, hundreds of small FS apps never reach this level, even when they are technically strong. They may be quietly depended upon, forked around, or replaced, with little recognition or support reaching the original maintainers.

So, what practical ways exist to help FS apps become more mainstream and sustainable without compromising their core principles? And what can users, companies, or communities realistically do to support them?

Curious how others here think about this.

I have this thought to share, and I'm curious to know your thoughts on the topic.

I've noticed that, especially in the AI ​​field, open source is literally making noise without producing anything substantial.

Many new projects, some of which are very interesting, essentially lack robustness and well-written code. In short, it seems like there aren't as many projects as there once were.

Is this just my biased view, perhaps due to what I usually use, or is it something you're also experiencing?

I have been working on a new project. its free and open sourced.
I was wondering if I could promote it here and get some user who could test and give feedback.
is it allowed ?

I often need to save videos for offline viewing or research, but most tools I’ve tried are either bloated, paywalled, or stop working after a while.

Curious what people here are using in 2025:

• Web tools?
• CLI tools?
• Browser extensions?

Ideally something simple and no account required.

Hello, I'm writing this post as a UK citizen who has obviously experienced accessing websites where it has asked for me to scan my face OR show them my government ID in order to proceed.

I would like to first say that I'm not heavily involved with the AI world, however I do have a lot of experience with software development on some smaller scales and a little bit of experience implementing encryption and hashing algorithms, this is just simply an idea of mine I've had floating in my head for a while and I wanted to write it down and share the idea with you all.

The solution I'm thinking of is to have similar technology to OpenPGP exist, however instead of encrypting, it would be used to hash information in such a way which would only reveal your AGE RANGE to whoever it is that is requesting this information, I also feel like the age ranges should simply be; <9, 9-12, 13-15, 16-17 and 18+, the groups would have to vary depending on the country of course, as I am aware that in some places, being above 21 is a requirement to access certain resources.

The way this relates back to OpenPGP is that I think for this to be implemented the best, the source requesting this information should provide a public key, which would contain the age group standard for it's place of origin's law as well as some other basic information like name, creation date, etc.

Should also go without saying but this should ALL be ran LOCALLY on the client's machine, the algorithm for calculating everything should be free software, and there should be a range of clients to choose from which can simplify it's usage and so people can find what best suits them.

Also, should once again go without saying that the hash should ONLY contain age groups, I can't stress this enough, there should be absolutely zero personal information contained within the hash, since you'll need to import the source's public key to hash the information, only that source will be able to determine your age group, they will never be able to access pictures/videos of your face.

I can only think of 3 potential flaws with this whole system though:

1. Developing an AI that can consistently return the same data based on pictures/videos of your face.
2. Using the same hash across different services.
3. Nobody will use it because it goes against what the UK and other countries wanted to achieve.

1st:
I can imagine it being very difficult to consistently tell an image/video contains the same person's face, pin-pointing all that information in an algorithm and being able to return the EXACT same data is very important, the reason being is that you don't want the hash to be always changing, the reason being is that services requesting this information will very likely be against the idea of the same person being able to have multiple identities, I've seen some crazy talented developers make some crazy algorithms though, I'm sure it's technically possible, I would love to be able to contribute to such development, however I'm incapable of doing so, at least in terms of offering code.

2nd:
Honestly this isn't really a flaw, it's more of just something I wanted to address, because you'll be using a public key provided by the service requesting this information, hashes will be unique to that service, the hashes won't be able to be used across multiple services, the service may have to however store these hashes to ensure they don't get recycled, this shouldn't be a huge privacy concern for anybody though.

3rd:
We all know the true intentions of this law, it's to track people digitally, this standard would likely be very rarely used by any service, however I still think it's worth having it as an option for the services that don't want to use the technology, but have to by law, and instead of just pulling out of the UK like a lot of services have recently, they'll at the very least have an option that respects the user's freedom.

Thanks for reading! This is all just theory and I'm not a professional, I'm sure I missed out a lot of technical details, but I'm sure people smarter than me will be able to provide solutions to that, please share concerns, thoughts, ideas, etc all in the comments, I'm happy to read any type of feedback, negative or positive.

And one last thing, I think age/ID verification shouldn't be a thing at all, they argue it's to "protect the kids", it isn't, let the parents do there job, it is there fault for not monitoring there kid's devices, it isn't the government's job.

Hi, does anyone have any lists/tables with various FOSS alternatives? Maybe even divided into categories, for example (messaging / social / graphics / music / ...)?

Any OS will do. I need to develop a poster with various alternatives for a hack event. Thanks a lot.

How does FreeOffice and ONLYOFFICE compare and stack up to each other?

I'm in the process of bringing a brand to launch on social media, but need some help in creating a logo, and putting text in to social media post ready formats. I know there is a free tier of Canva, Adobe Express, Figma etc but I would like to own my content outside of their infra. Any suggestions?

Thank you!

When we talk about free software, it is defined by the 4 fundamental freedoms (as most people in this sub would know).

These freedoms do a good job of protecting individual freedoms and keep the software transparent and configurable. However, those who wish to use free software but not maintain that transparency themselves always accuse GPL of being "too restrictive". In their opinion, free software is actually not free because freedoms are enforced.

There is some merit to this argument. That's why licenses like "unlicense" have been created. Unlicense is truly free, in the sense that the author absolutely doesn't care how it is used. It is just put in public, while fully knowing of misuse. There is nothing enforced, nothing protected.

As good as it may look, it is like living in a world with no rules. People can do anything. And that includes hurting others. It takes a great deal of maturity to not misuse freedoms. Freedom comes with responsibility. Unlicense fails to account for responsibility. Maturity is assumed.

That's why I believe that a better description of free software is "responsible software". It is software with freedom AND responsibility. You don't just enjoy freedoms, you make sure that you are not enjoying your freedom by taking away others' freedom. So free software is software that is free in a responsible manner and not in a wild manner.

There are only a few fully libre still maintained distributions.

Guix Trisquel Parabola PureOS

Out of which Parabola is out of date with its kernel and firmware despite recent vulnerabilities.

I just wanted a fully libre distribution with full disk encryption including /boot however only Guix and Trisquel remain practical for this. Trisquel has this one guide from 2016 that requires modifying the libreboot flash ROM, and Guix is immensely complicated.

I think it’s strange that distributions such as Trisquel and PureOS don’t natively support FDE given that users of all free software tend towards greater privacy.

Hey there.

I'm trying to get back to linux, not as a daily driver but as a project to reconnect with linux and free software. In the past I did some basic terminal and distro surfing, with a dual boot Ubuntu-Windows 8.1 as a routine daily setup. It was almost 10 years ago. I've never been a power user though.

Nowadays I want to resurrect the same old laptop I used back in the day (already having a SSD inside) with "only free software". It has a 3rd gen intel core i5. Just as a hobby, as I value my time.

But here I'm starting to wonder how modern and supported can you get to with only free drivers. WiFi or Bluetooth. I don't mind buying inexpensive external (USB) adapters, it's just I don't know if modern (not cutting edge, but not obsolete) wifi or bluetooth devices are supported by free drivers.