I’m going to open a series of moonshot discussions, as a way of helping people explore what’s possible when full source code is available for a complete system. If any of these inspire people to start actual projects, so much the better!
The first moonshot project I’m proposing is to set up a local version of F-Droid. An app library project that aspires to respect the software freedoms of people using Android-based mobile OS like Replicant.
The whole idea of F-Droid is that every piece of software they offer or use - from the app library right down to the code forge they develop on - has full source code available. So this moonshot project could start as computer science research that just replicates their methodology, to see if that creates the same results.
But if someone in Aotearoa did that, they’d have the basis for a local alternative to F-Droid. That’s could be useful for a number of reasons. But one of the most obvious to me is that according to a post by SkewedZeppelin on the Privacy Guides forum;
“f-droid.org pushed out nearly 186TB in June [2023] alone.”
We want a freedom-respecting mobile app experience to be available to all. So we need to either invest huge amounts of volunteer time and donations to grow a centralised F-Droid project to the size of the Goggle Prey Store, OR, decentralise F-Droid. For example, by having local software freedom groups setting up localised alternatives.
