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The idea of a new free cross-platform remote access product sounds great if it can be trusted. That "if" is however a very big if. The website says HopToDesk i
by yodon 4y ago
The idea of a new free cross-platform remote access product sounds great if it can be trusted. That "if" is however a very big if.
The website says HopToDesk is Open Source but there is no link to any repos that I can find on the website. GitLab has a recently opened HopToDesk account with just 5 stars and no obvious traceability on first look from my phone to any real identifiable human contributors.
HopToDesk says it's an American company based in the US but LinkedIn is not showing me any evidence of the company existing and no employees associated with it. Neither does the preliminary googling I've done. My searches are far from exhaustive and certainly not authoritative but normally when someone builds a company that solves an important problem the people involved are proud of having done so and are easily findable. The first 5 other remote access software companies I looked up on LinkedIn all had obvious search results with easily discoverable employees, founders, and etc.
The License file in the GitLab repo is a generic AGPL file with no mention of any corporate entity or individual holding any copyrights. Again, this is a quick look from my phone so not authoritative, but again it's not at all confidence inspiring.
Commercial remote access products are quite expensive to subscribe to and typically have real costs to operate in the form of connectivity charges. If customers are not paying for the service, are the customers (and their machines) the real product being sold here?
I'm not finding anything in a quick search that gives me any confidence I should trust this app, and I'm seeing lots of things that are not confidence inspiring.
- jonas-w 4y agoJust fyi, the "Source"[0] link is at the bottom of the page [0] https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk https://gitlab.com/hoptodesk/hoptodesk
- yodon 4y agoThanks - it's also become apparent the repo is a fork of RustDesk, which isn't immediately obvious from either the site contents or the repo history.
- sirius87 4y agoSo what happens in cases like these? Looks like RustDesk doesn't have a Copyright notice or copyright info in the license or source code. This codebase comes along and has no attribution information to make it obvious that it is indeed a fork of RustDesk. Is the copyright implicit, and is HopToDesk in legal violation for not making it apparent?
- yodon 4y agoRustDesk looks to just have a generic AGPL license with no additional copyright listed beyond the Free Software Foundation copyright statement. IANAL but my read is that means RustDesk releases its code under a license that allows this type of activity. The FSF is the strongest champion of free as in libre licenses. Free as in libre is intentionally far more permissive than free as in beer. There are times when free as in libre is desired for all kinds of good use cases, but that unfortunately also means the projects are also free as in libre for all kinds of bad use cases. That's the fundamental challenge everyone who works in open source software has to deal with. Free as in libre and free as in beer are different things, and as soon as you start putting restrictions on use cases you shift from free as in libre to free as in beer (or not even free as in beer). Maybe someday we'll have licenses that neatly resolve this problem, but we don't yet and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. RustDesk likely chose the AGPL in part because in many people's minds AGPL offers an appealing intersection of free as in libre with requirements that many view as in conflict with running the software as a business. HopToDesk would be an existence proof that AGPL is not the barrier to commercial operations that some people advocate it is, leaving the world in a state where licensing open source code for "good" uses only (as in you can't take my open source code and make a competing business with it) is a hard unsolved problem. As another commenter here mentioned, Blender has had a lot of challenges with this sort of thing, as have a range of open source projects that hope to make money off hosting of their projects and consequently don't want AWS offering branded hosting of their projects.
- pakitan 4y agoJudging by the trustpilot review solicitation, the business model could be "start free, amass trustpilot reviews and backlinks for SEO purposes, rank near the top of google searches, start charging for the service".