@fdroidorg at this point is being used to push out an app with sensitive permissions that’s been taken over by an unknown individual who refuses to engage with its large community of users and developers.
I STRONGLY recommend disabling updates from Fdroid, if not uninstalling and manually installing 2.0.11.2, or installing the Google Play version which has a different maintainer.
this is extremely shady and it’s just looking worse as time goes on. I’ll link to the Syncthing forum thread from about where I left off last time in a subsequent post.
Projects change hands all the time. If someone wants to use a fork, do that. The entitlement here is fucking wild.
Bruh what the fuck are you talking about?
You think that a user being upset when they give an app full filesystem access to their phone, and then having that app be handed over to some shady new owner is entitlement?
Congratulations man, ‘skill issue’ people like you are why open source software rarely takes off. No one will use or trust any open source software if this happens. This just pushes people to use tech giants like Google and Microsoft because they’re big and stable and not about to change owners.
Don’t fucking publish your software for people to download if you’re going to pull the rug out from under them. Keep it on your local machine and jerk off to it if you don’t care about others using it.
Don’t businesses transfer to shady owners all the time? The longer time goes on, the older these developers get, the more we will have projects either transfer, die out, or someone fork.
Let’s look at the timeline.
Developer was maintaining app, didn’t wanna do it any more and suggested everyone use the most popular fork.
The maintainer of said most popular fork, after a while, didn’t wanna do it any more and after asking for maintainers for a while, found one on her own and handed him the project.
Entitled AF users, who aren’t looking to maintain the project, don’t like the cut of the new maintainers jib and thus kick up a fuss.
At this point, there’s zero new forks available on F-Droid or IzzyOnDroid, proving it’s not about anything other than kicking up a fuss.
Anyone that is so outraged, put your time and effort where your mouth is. Stop with the brigading and actually maintain and publish a fork.
Personally, I trust nutomic and catfiend and if I trusted catfiend to maintain the app, I will trust their vouch for the new maintainer too.
To my knowledge, the only problem was that there was no communication about the handover. If there had been a post on the original repo with reasoning for Catfriend stepping down, instead of the repo just disappearing (from what I heard), there would’ve been no drama…
Admittedly, I did not look into it too deeply, though.
Catfriend was actively openly looking for a replacement for ages and couldn’t find one. No one was stepping up. When she eventually found someone, suddenly everyone wants to have a say. What was she supposed to do, put her life and mental health on hold until the community that wasn’t helping maintain the project, vetted the replacement she found? I don’t know how people can’t see that their expectations are out of whack here. As I said before, if any one of the people who are whipping up the storm had stepped up to takeover, there’d somewhat of point to this, but that’s not happening. It’s just pitchforks for the sake of pitchforks.
It’s just the process of the handover that is making people skittish with the github going private then reappearing with a new maintainer.
I think best route would have been for researchxxl to just fork syncthing-fork to put on F-droid, and catfriend1 just leave their branch archived with an endorsement of researchxxl.
After some time passes and researchxxl gains trust in the community I’m sure people will trust their work. The transition just wasn’t handled well.
I’ve been running STFork for so long I forgot its not the mainline app.
Guess it’s time to learn how to host my own Relay server.