420stalin69 [he/him]

If the public are paying for it, then it becomes a subsidy.

And good luck getting the US government to require the code to be GPLed. That’s even less likely to happen than a public subsidy for OSS at all.

They typically do the opposite and require “commercialization” to ensure the benefit of the publicly-funded technology is captured by their donors.

This is how it basically works in biotech, for example. Government grants to study the medicine and then when the scientists actually find something important it becomes a “public-private partnership” often without even a royalty for the public let alone making it a public good.

That’s not how government funding works in a modern democracy, unfortunately. It would amount to a cash transfer to big tech to make the public pay their R&D costs.

So a public subsidy for big tech to get free code?

VPNs are much cheaper than Netflix, torrents don’t have ads, it’s always perfect quality, and the content catalog is excellent.

There was that hot Somali who was Tik Tokking himself while boarding a cargo ship.

But he was enforcing a blockade enacted by his government within Yemeni territorial waters so unfortunately it wasn’t piracy.

They’re not wrong.

Apple has a better stance on data privacy than google because their profit model is being a premium consumer device whereas googles profit model is being a provider of ads.

Apple’s incentives are closer to the consumer since they want to make the consumer happy while googles incentives are aligned with the trackers because that improves ad revenue.

This changes the DNA of the OS.

Plus the integration of googles data insecure services with android mean that as a matter of actual reality then discussing the security of android really means discussing the data security of those integrated services. It’s unavoidable.

Don’t trust either of course but I simply do have more confidence my apple data isn’t being exploited as much as my google data simply because Apple doesn’t stand as much to gain and stands more to lose from being embarrassed on the issue.

And pointing to custom android roms that replace google services with FOSS alternatives is a technically correct but still wrong answer to this because it doesn’t reflect the reality of the overwhelming majority of android users.

Implying Spotify pays artists a fair fee.

Fuck, and I cannot emphasize this enough, them