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I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonab
by apatters 9y ago
I don't know, the alternatives are getting better. Maybe not consumer grade, but usable, especially for a developer. For the past few years I've made a reasonable effort to use ethical software as long as it doesn't make my job too hard, and here are the results:
- Ubuntu is my daily driver OS, with Windows getting booted once in a blue moon to play some games
- Firefox for 80% of my browsing (the other 20% is Chromium on a Chromebook, which seems to run faster than FF even in an Ubuntu chroot with crouton)
- Thunderbird and a plain ol' IMAP mail server for email
- Maybe half of my messaging has moved to Signal
- Searx.me for web searches, sure I'm using the Google results more often than not, but at least my queries are anonymized, and switching to other providers is easy
I started a business on a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack, and I sleep better at night because of that. I gave our latest hire most of the same desktop software I use, and so far no major problems.
I'll grant you that the UI of some of this software is a little creaky, but I get by, and overall I'd say most of the nasty bugs we have to deal with in our toolkit are in closed source SaaS stuff.
Some notable unethical holdouts include occasional Skype/Hangouts calls, Slack, Google Docs, and Dropbox. Also a bunch of small-time SaaS products. But give me time.
- majewsky 9y ago> a very boring, conventional tech stack that gets a lot of hate on HN--PHP and WordPress--but it's a free and ethical stack That's not exactly a unique feature of this stack. Most web stacks are free and open source.
- elsurudo 9y agoWhy do you consider "small-time SaaS products" as "unethical", if I may ask? They may be "potentially unethical" since you don't know exactly what they are doing with your data, but it's not for certain.
- unknown2374 9y agohe said a "bunch of small-time SaaS products", not all of them.
- apatters 9y agoThis is a deliberate oversimplification, but in order of most to least concerning, these are flags which get raised in my brain most often. If they get raised then I consider the company's ethics questionable and when time permits we evaluate alternatives. - The company supports or enables injustice or human rights violations - The company collects a lot of personal information and does creepy or obscure stuff with it - The company does not release the source of its products Virtually all SaaS gets dinged because of #3, and in a perfect world we'd somehow replace them all with self-hosted, open source alternatives, but that's a tall order. I'm not a zealot about any of this, I just make sure I set aside a little time aside every quarter to evaluate ethical alternatives. Legitimately "doing no evil" is absolutely a benefit I'll pay money for.
- jdormit 9y agoSo are you hosting your own IMAP server? If so, have you any problems with your emails being filtered out as spam? EDIT: Bit of a brain-fart. IMAP is just a client of a mail server. So to rephrase my question - what mail server do you use?
- ReligiousFlames 9y agoThis reminds me of that "hackproof" box BBC reviewed that was a Raspberry Pi that couldn't update itself. Also, having run an email startup in London, patching and anti-spam at almost any scale is nontrivial.
- apatters 9y agoFor personal mailboxes we're running exim on a managed VPS with a dedicated IP at a small hosting company. They have very diligent customer support and appear to keep their IP allocation clean, as we've never had problems with our emails being filtered as flagged as spam. They generally handle patching and configuration when we ask them to, or assist us when we want to do it ourselves. For volume mailing we use ESPs like Mailgun and Sendgrid. Occasional deliverability problems are a fact of life at those.