I think we all agree that we have to use free/libre/open source software all the way.
Practically, do we? We all do to some extent, but I bet, none of us is 100%.
This very forum is hosted on a VM at hetzner. How better is it than AWS? How libre is the stack of this very forum?
Are you familiar with [B-corp}(https://bcorporation.net/). I’m a bit, and I find it very interesting.
The part that I’d like to share with you is the following.
There are 200 points. To be a B corp, you need to fill a form about these 200 points.
And you also need to explain how you will improve this score. Some years after, you have to show that you did what you planned, and you improved.
We are all on a journey to get better at what we do. And I love the positive story they are telling. I find it a lot more powerful than telling @zauberstuhl that he is not part of the club because of some details. I find it better to tell him, there is just this point missing, and you are part of the club.
But the forum and all the data within can be taken and hosted somewhere else – that is the important part. In order to satisfy our 3rd principle everything that we host must be VM/hardware agnostic.
It would be a problem if a service provided by a librehoster had a some tight integration with AWS that prevented me from cloning it and running it myself using some other VM provider.
From public knowledge, Hetzner is not part of the surveillance capitalism, and not one of the GMAFIA, contrary to Amazon that runs AWS. That makes a clear and undeniable difference to me.
DANONE is the largest food B-Corp. DANONE kills people.
I certainly don’t find FENEAS’ mission statement a detail. And it certainly matters than your mission statement explicitly supports non-free software. So why are you doing this?
Agreed. FENEAS fails on point 2 “Promote free software” by stating in their mission statement that “One really important point here to me is that we don’t discriminate against people or projects that are not FLOSS, or even OSS. If a proprietary platform comes to us for help or people building proprietary platforms join the association - great!”
One really important point to me when you promote free software is not to promote proprietary software.
I do not live with “if”. I live with clear statements that say that they do not “discriminate against non FLOSS…”. This is bullshit. You cannot discrimate against proprietary software because proprietary software companies are dominant. You can never discriminate against the dominant. Not making that difference, you are not ready to promote librehosting, and certainly not Web federation, since Web federation was born out of opposition to surveillance capitalism. Supporting surveillance capitalists into embracing the Web federation, you’re simply collaborating with the enemy. FENEAS is not saying anything else.
When FENEAS grows up and figures out that software freedom is political, and the Web federation is political, then maybe I can revise my stance, but right now this is wasting my time and my nerves. I do not agree with their stance, and I hope it’s clear why.
I like the idea of a list with points system. It can also function as a learning opportunity.
I see you coming back to this with the AMD example too. During the LibreHosters kickoff meeting it was defined the line was currently drawn at the OS level and not using proprietary API’s (like amazon s3). As @mbooth is nicely formulating it: