I don't necessarily blame the developer for selling: I understand that some offers are difficult to refuse. But I absolutely do blame him for being dishonest to his users and contributors.
No one was told about this. People only found out about the sale by chance, because someone noticed that the Play Store listing details were changed and made a post on Reddit.
When confronted on GitHub, the developer gave evasive answers, citing vague and unrelated issues, such as "the quality of the Android ecosystem dropping".
I assume a lot of users bought these apps with the expectation that they were not infested with ads, data mining, dark patterns, etc. Most people have automatic updates enabled, and they will get all of the above shoved into their face before they can prevent it.
The value of these acquisitions is determined almost entirely by the userbase. The developer was only able to get this deal because of his users. At the very least, they deserved to be treated with some basic amount of respect.
I once found a nice open source ambient noise generator on F-Droid. Fully local, offline.
One day the developer decided to switch to a pay SaaS model. They updated the open source app to be a thin client for their web service.
Surely many existing users on the play store found quite a surprise when they updated!
F-Droid at least provides a little protection here, with the independent builds and easy downgrades, and if the community is big enough you see forks appear. But sadly this kind of cashing in is always going to be a risk with open source software in app stores.
So, to be fair, the thing about his displeasure with Android was in response to somebody asking if he would be involved in helping maintain a fork that’s being set up. He said no and gave his Android reasons. Which to me sounds like he’s literally getting out of Android development.
Now, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom of that thread and GitHub, but no one really seem to ask him why he didn’t give notice of to anybody. The comments were either like, no, don’t do it, or we’ve gotta fork this. They weren’t really about how he has handled the issue.
Doesn't the GPL protect third-party contributions in ways that liberal licences do not? I think the author might have trouble re-licensing third-party GPL contributions under a proprietary licence, but IANAL.
From what I gather, the author isn't re-licensing the code but is selling their copyright and brand (trademark?) to Zipo, who in turn will probably try to re-license it (without permission from other contributors) or will simply choose to violate the license.
This is very sad. It understand that everyone needs to put food on the table and probably Tibor got an offer he couldn't refuse, maybe combined with burnout working on these apps for so long. So I can understand that.
That being said, the lack of transparency is not acceptable. Apart from one little acknowledgement in the above GitHub issue, there's zero communication on his part. Given that people actually paid, donated or even contributed source to his projects, even if it was not much, he has an obligation to these users/contributors and be open about the future of these apps. Most importantly:
- Will the apps remain FOSS? If a license change is planned, what about people who contributed and don't agree with that change?
- Which releases will be affected: What about the "Pro" version people paid for? What about the versions on F-Droid?
Oh, no. I liked those tools, but I don't let them update since they started having "premium versions".
The web site still says "A group of simple, open source Android apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors." They're on F-Droid.
> Oh, no. I liked those tools, but I don't let them update since they started having "premium versions".
Expecting project maintainers to solely fund the development of open source projects used by millions of people is the leopard that keeps eating our faces.
I wonder how much universal basic income, or at least a stronger economy, could spur FOSS development. I feel like the 2008 crisis and the rise of the precariat put a permanent dent in the phenomenon of non-professional devs maintaining free-software projects as a hobby.
Somehow this leopard only exists on systems like Android and Google Play Store or web browser extension stores, but notably not in places like F-Droid or the repos of any common GNU/Linux distribution.
"Leopard eats face" is a dumb reddit thought-terminating cliche. I invite you to actually think about the problem and ask yourself why developers of FOSS tools selling out happens in some domains but not others, and effects some users without warning but not others.
Simple Mobile makes apps like file managers and image galleries. Just how much work is required to maintain this besides keeping the file access API up to date? Not sure if that's even had any breaking changes on Android in the past several years.
There's something fishy with this company, people report getting charged without asking, however all the positive reviews of said company is from specifically app devs who sold their app to this company![0]
Many moons ago, an acquaintance sold his app account ( with apps like battery saver apps etc ) to an Israeli company. As i recall, in that case, the acquisition was for data-harvesting purposes.
Simple gallery of all apps on my phone were ones which always worked, from f droid, without any hitch, handled like 20k photos like a champ and had "hidden folder" thing. I love this thing.
Glad their is a fork. I don't use other apps, they are either feature incomplete or not intuitive but gallery is solid 10.
Readit News
I don't necessarily blame the developer for selling: I understand that some offers are difficult to refuse. But I absolutely do blame him for being dishonest to his users and contributors.
No one was told about this. People only found out about the sale by chance, because someone noticed that the Play Store listing details were changed and made a post on Reddit.
When confronted on GitHub, the developer gave evasive answers, citing vague and unrelated issues, such as "the quality of the Android ecosystem dropping".
I assume a lot of users bought these apps with the expectation that they were not infested with ads, data mining, dark patterns, etc. Most people have automatic updates enabled, and they will get all of the above shoved into their face before they can prevent it.
The value of these acquisitions is determined almost entirely by the userbase. The developer was only able to get this deal because of his users. At the very least, they deserved to be treated with some basic amount of respect.
One day the developer decided to switch to a pay SaaS model. They updated the open source app to be a thin client for their web service.
Surely many existing users on the play store found quite a surprise when they updated!
F-Droid at least provides a little protection here, with the independent builds and easy downgrades, and if the community is big enough you see forks appear. But sadly this kind of cashing in is always going to be a risk with open source software in app stores.
Now, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom of that thread and GitHub, but no one really seem to ask him why he didn’t give notice of to anybody. The comments were either like, no, don’t do it, or we’ve gotta fork this. They weren’t really about how he has handled the issue.
What a bunch of idiots.
That being said, the lack of transparency is not acceptable. Apart from one little acknowledgement in the above GitHub issue, there's zero communication on his part. Given that people actually paid, donated or even contributed source to his projects, even if it was not much, he has an obligation to these users/contributors and be open about the future of these apps. Most importantly:
- Will the apps remain FOSS? If a license change is planned, what about people who contributed and don't agree with that change?
- Which releases will be affected: What about the "Pro" version people paid for? What about the versions on F-Droid?
The web site still says "A group of simple, open source Android apps without ads and unnecessary permissions, with customizable colors." They're on F-Droid.
Expecting project maintainers to solely fund the development of open source projects used by millions of people is the leopard that keeps eating our faces.
"Leopard eats face" is a dumb reddit thought-terminating cliche. I invite you to actually think about the problem and ask yourself why developers of FOSS tools selling out happens in some domains but not others, and effects some users without warning but not others.
I suspect you’re mistaking commercial companies pretending to be doing open source with actual community-driven open source.
[0]https://www.trustpilot.com/review/zipoapps.com?page=2
Announcement: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
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Glad their is a fork. I don't use other apps, they are either feature incomplete or not intuitive but gallery is solid 10.
Hope we can maintain the fork