Just yesterday someone joined in Plasma Mobile matrix room, asking for help and support for developing a native Signal client.
The post was immediately responded by some of my fellow developers with the responses which were basically,
- Why signal when matrix is available and superior to it
- While signal is open-source it does not provide all freedom to modify/redistribute
- People should stop using signal
Some of these are important concerns but it made me think about the very initial Plasma Mobile announcement,
Important bits being,
The goal for Plasma Mobile is to give the user full use of the device. It is designed as an inclusive system, intended to support all kinds of apps. Native apps are developed using Qt; it will also support apps written in GTK, Android apps, Ubuntu apps, and many others, if the license allows and the app can be made to work at a technical level.
and
Most offerings on mobile devices lack openness and trust. In a world of walled gardens, Plasma Mobile is intended to be a platform that respects and protects user privacy. It provides a fully open base that others can help develop and use for themselves, or in their products.
Plasma Mobile aims to be not a walled garden, and provides a full control/freedom to users, which interestingly also comes with freedom to use the walled garden inside your open garden.
If user can not have this freedom or is actively being pushed towards ecosystem liked by the developers, then what we have created is a walled garden with illusion of being open garden.
There is also question of the mission for Plasma Mobile,
As a Free software community, it is our mission to give users the option of retaining full control over their data. The choice for a mobile operating system should not be a choice between missing functions or forsaken privacy of user data and personal information. Plasma Mobile offers the ability to choose the services that are allowed to integrate deeply into the system. It will not share any data unless that is explicitly requested.
Where we aim that users have full control over their data and do not use closed systems.
Which is why we need to find a balance between both of this goals/mission. We need to make sure that our default user experience does not make use of closed ecosystem software and at same time if users/developers have preference or requirement of using other systems we enable them to do so to best of our capability.
Day #6 of the #100DaysToOffload series.
After a long break due to some personal stuff I am back to writing for #100DaysToOffload