It's popular idea for a lot of innovation focused groups tbh. "If I have the people what they asked for I would have given them faster horses." -Henry Ford

And to a certain degree there is truth to it.

I disabled shorts and went through my front page and said to not show me stupid addictive content and then also took two weeks off. I also used libredirect addon on Firefox to redirect all YouTube links to inviduos so that if a link somewhere took me there I didn't get sucked right back.

Sweet, keeps it FOSS while people that want to make closed source apps have to pay for it.

As a former RedHat advocate it sucks honestly, I have to find companies like Rancher and Suse that off truly FOSS products now. Like I want opensource devs to get paid if they are being depended on, but the RedHat paywall makes avoiding the vendor lock or trying to be cost flexible a legal land mine. They also offer more and more proprietary rebrands of FOSS projects that I fear will get EEEd as well.

I'm not going to lie but I've been playing around with a VDI setup for internet cafes. Let's you use servers that places are liquidating in the back, but cheaper thinclient/zero client at the actual desks. Also helps reduce user damage and theft where that is a concern (can't tell you how many IT tickets I've worked because of people kicking cables).

I've described it as cost flexible, because you should be funding or ensure developers are funded to a level appropriate level of risk to operations if a vulnerability is discovered or a critical failure prevents a correct operation.

That's for big business and governments at least. Small businesses also has the same concerns but the risk matrix for them is just different.

| the core products have been open source

They have been pushing more of the distribution into their proprietary app store format despite what the community says about it

Beauty of FOSS

In order of trust I put it third for browsers that I expect to work with most of the internet. It goes Tor, Firefox, and finally Brave. I like Brave's direction and appreciate them trying to find ethical and sustainable funding models, but they're just not as heavily audited as the first two

I don't trust VPNs that I don't run, Tor is the answer here for me too. Search I am not sure how it compares to DDG tbh so no idea

In terms of level of trust, it's enough for a threat model that doesn't include state actors or any other APT, but nothing more. it shouldn't be ran with elevated privileges and should be sandboxed (i.e. flatpak) and if possible on a separate system from sensitive information. I could be convinced otherwise but I haven't seen a reputable organization discuss an audit of it's code nor have I audited it's code

Or games with massive kernel level spyware! It's wild where some of the gaming space is at right now.

Tbh the biggest saving from this that I've actually heard was time saving some 6 months or even potentially saving legal costs during development. Which for a budget starting closer to nothing,like academics, open source, or early start ups, any cost is barrier.

I don't like it personally, I don't contribute to projects that are designed to easily feed non-free systems. There is a lot of corporate influence both direct, but even more in people catering to companies potential of exploitation in order to maximize there and the projects value to corporate interests.

It's common for these people to just not see these as tools that "normal" people need, but as tools for companies that admins, and devs use. This is in stark contrast as to when gnu utils were deved