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My random €0.03: - I see "stores" such as Flathub or App Store mostly as infrastructure, and infrastructure should be a commodity. Still, whenever you can choo
by rollcat 3y ago
My random €0.03:
- I see "stores" such as Flathub or App Store mostly as infrastructure, and infrastructure should be a commodity. Still, whenever you can choose a supplier for a commodity, you should make a conscious decision based on questions such as "are you really 100% renewable 24x7 or are burning coal to handle the peak". Blog posts such as these should be a part of Flathub's official "propaganda engine", so that (potential) users get exposure to the outlined problems.
- You can provide users with certain strong guarantees about what your review/testing/distribution process will or won't allow, which sets a minimum baseline of trustworthiness for each and every single app. This can be extremely powerful; I trust Apple's store much more than I would ever trust Google's, solely based on the values both companies represent; however neither of them could ever hope to be as trustworthy as Debian.
- Providing a paid builder service to proprietary apps could be a strong incentive by itself, and help the bottom line. Apple launched a build service, but infamously does literally nothing at any and every stage to help accommodate FOSS apps in their ecosystem. What if Flathub could get one step ahead, and show everyone: "OK, you have a different business/source access model, we recognize that, and we're willing to accommodate you". I feel that it has the potential to generate a lot of goodwill from both users and developers, and then also influence the industry at large.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoI think for a store like flathub to be competitive, it should just remove as much friction form the release process as possible. Most upstream developers will likely have their own infrastructure. So, the added value is dubious. And imagine every other store insisted on this, that would add up to a lot of build hassle for developers. And of course not all applications are open source to begin with and a lot of those have a lot of other stores to worry about as well. There are probably very few exclusive Flathub only applications out there. A lot of them are also in Ubuntu's snap store. And then there's the Apple store, the windows store, etc. So, I would recommend to focus on growing the application ecosystem instead of putting up a lot of obstacles and bureaucracy. Make it easy for popular (proprietary and OSS) application developers to target Linux via Flathub. Putting up all sorts of requirements on where and how to build is not helpful for that and likely to make people think twice before bothering with a Flathub release.
- vetinari 3y ago> Most upstream developers will likely have their own infrastructure. So, the added value is dubious. They could make it optional; but the artefacts of those who use it, would be more trustworthy, since flathub can guarantee their BOM. The same way, as you can trust binaries from F-Droid more, than from Google Play.
- gjsman-1000 3y ago> The same way, as you can trust binaries from F-Droid more, than from Google Play. Actually, no. I'm forgetting the exact details - but F-Droid (if I recall correctly) re-signs all packages with its own key, removing the developer's signing key. There's some infrastructure reason for it. Google Play keeps that key. This is also why GrapheneOS offers sandboxed Google Play and recommends using that over F-Droid. https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/ https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
- mook 3y agoF-Droid will use your original signatures as long as they can rebuild the binary to be identical (excluding the signature), to verify that everything is open source. They only discard your signatures if they can't confirm that, to avoid issues with hosting proprietary bits. https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/ https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
- seba_dos1 3y ago> but F-Droid (if I recall correctly) re-signs all packages with its own key, removing the developer's signing key The reason why they do that (in some cases) is exactly why F-Droid is more trustworthy than Google Play.
- piaste 3y agoI run GrapheneOS. It's an amazing project, and I always pay attention to what their developers say. But you should keep in mind that the GrapheneOS project is very laser-focused on a certain threat model: aggressively malicious software that tries to exploit vulnerabilities to escape its sandboxes. And they fight against that threat very well (there have been a couple of recent high-profile Android CVEs to which GrapheneOS users were immune). But they are - rightfully - less concerned about the far more common threat of apps including crapload of tracking libraries, battery-burning ads, or dark patterns requesting unnecessary permissions. They provide you with tools to fight them - Storage Scopes and Contact Scopes are amazing! - but ultimately it's up to the user to e.g. choose a serious calculator app like Calculator++ instead of some spyware. And against that threat, it is an excellent idea to search on F-Droid first instead of the Play Store (where the first non-Google, non-Samsung result is indeed an ad-filled spyware calculator). Then, if you want to secure yourself against the possibility of the F-Droid signing keys being compromised, you may choose to delay/disable automatic updates, or simply to download the Play Store version of the F-Droid-hosted apps.
- jraph 3y ago> My random €0.03 Inflation?