Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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There's no such thing as a FOSS service. The software they use might be FOSS but a service cannot be.
There are free services that are genuinely free but they have nothing to do with FOSS.
Ok, so what do you call Bitwarden, matrix, openstreetmaps, Mastodon, or Lemmy?
OSM is database
The code? Free and Open Source Software.
An instance of the software running as a service? A service.
The official Bitwarden service has a free and a more featureful paid tier.
Element offers paid hosting as a service with a limited free tier.
OSM isn't software?
Mastodon and Lemmy are hosted and financed by individuals or organisations who usually choose to offer their service free of charge.
All of these are FOSS underneath but have very different costs. There is a difference between commercial for-profit services (BW, Element) and non-profit/public benefit ones (Lemmy, Mastodon) with the latter usually being free of charge.
There's very little difference between a commercial FOSS application as a service and a commercial non-free software as a service.
For example, you could also buy Slack as a service as opposed to Element. In the end it's a bill of $x/user/month. Nothing "free" about that other than the hosted software's source code.
The free in FOSS doesn't mean free of charge. All those paid services are still FOSS.
That doesn't change the fact that they're services, not software. These are fundamentally different things.
No, they're not mutually exclusive. These services are software.
The software is the "primary component" but a service is far more than just a piece of software.
It's providing infrastructure for the software to run in, maintaining said infrastructure, providing support to customers, billing/accounting, hiring people to do all of that etc. I'd even go as far as saying that the software being hosted ifself plays no major role in the service part.
Sure, but that's exactly what people mean when they say FOSS service.
Regardless, that's not the discussion we're having. The point is that those services are free of charge, and you're not the product. And that a big reason for that is that they are FOSS services.
Arguing about what people mean is futile. The point the other poster is making, and you've now agreed to be true, is that FOSS is software and a service is a service.
Most services powered by FOSS offer a free service as a taster for the paid service. The money made in the paid service tiers pay for the free tiers. Hopefully.
So, do we agree that saying that "if a service is free, you are the product" doesn't apply to FOSS services?