Murena collaborating with our worst privacy enemy?

So, Murena is going to collaborate with our worst privacy enemy the European commission?
There was a propaganda item on Dutch tell a vision about mobifree.
NL spokesman from Murena Rick V. was in it…
https://mobifree.org/

This is funded by the EU commision, this text and the logo’s are suddenly removed from waag.org:

Dit project is mogelijk gemaakt door financiering uit het Next Generation Internet (NGI)-initiatief van de Europese Commissie. Het project heeft financiering ontvangen vanuit de Europese Unie’s Horizon Europe onderzoek en innovatie programma onder Grant Agreement nummer 101069813.

This is not good folks…

Regain your privacy! Adopt /e/OS the deGoogled mobile OS and online servicesphone

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Why is the European Commission “our worst privacy enemy”? It’s a supra-governmental agency made of civil servants, under democratic control. The enemies are for-profit companies who sell our data.

I see nothing wrong with /e/ getting public funding. The EU funds our roads,our schools, our museums, why not also our free and open source software?

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the European Commission is not under democratic control, but under for-profit companies control… they write the directives that have to be voted.

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Let’s go down that road for a moment… If corporations are funding the commission in aggregate, and the commission decides who receives grants, isn’t there enough distance to prevent Google levels of egregious misuse?

The devil is always in the details, but i submit that there are few good options. Really, here is the list:

  1. Ask nicely for donations. This is what Murena has been doing so far, but it limits growth. Only a small fraction of users donate, and at that, it’s very inconsistent. it becomes very difficult to handle things like paid positions when income is variable.

  2. Paywall. This makes things a bit more consistent, but there’s a huge difference between being a monthly Patreon supporter, and having software force a subscription. Either the software stops being open source, or someone releases /F/OS in the same way CentOS did for Red Hat… But without the corporate support contracts to make up the difference.

  3. Advertising. Self-explanatory, also see “/f/OS”, but ad-free.

  4. Corporate money. Nginx, Firefox, Red Hat…all of those larger projects that end up relying on corporate money.

Bonus: government funding. I’m unaware of an open source initiative that has managed to be solvent based primarily on government funds… But even if they were, i would be nervous that /e/OS would end up being leveraged for something like the Anom phones if they were ever to be reliant on government funding.

So, unless we are all willing to donate a huge amount to /e/ monthly, or unless Tony Stark is going to come out of the woodwork, there will be to be another source of income… And i think that government distributed corporate funds are about as close to a neutral source as /e/ is going to get.

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On a side note, and since there’s some confusion about the subject. You can very well be a billion dollar company like Red Hat and base your business entirely on open source software.

I’m teaching a course about Unix, Linux & Open Source Software at our local university. Here’s my course material about enterprise Linux.

Similarly, you can be an entity like the European Commission and decide to fund free software.

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A sidenote: @Franc, I really do not appreciate your wording about “worst enemy” - that might be okay for some weirdo telegram group - but in my humble opinion that’s not appropriate for this public forum.

If you have criticism about the European Commission, feel free to raise your arguments and discuss it here, but not with this kind of populist lingo.

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Okay, probably you do not have absorbed some info the last 8 years.
The EU commision is the undemocratic place where laws are made.
I can talk about it for days, but I know people must figure it out themselves to believe it is so worse.

Take a look at the site of Patrick Breyer:
"Highly controversial, non-transparent and rarely questioned: the Commission and Council of the European Union are currently preparing a new, EU-wide digital surveillance package. The plan includes the reintroduction and expansion of the retention of citizens’ communications data as well as specific proposals to undermine the secure encryption of data on all connected devices, ranging from cars to smartphones, as well as data processed by service providers and data in transit.¨
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eugoingdark-surveillance-plan-timeline-agenda-background/

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Oh, it is all about the money?
Really?
Sorry, I thougt it was about privacy here.

BigTech aka Sillicon Valley was a government idea. It’s not a coincedence that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon are all extremely large companies now.

BigTech is spying on people because they are implementing a digital control society like Chinese model. Our data is gold. It gives them power and control over everything we do and can do.

The EU commission want to implement client side scanning aka chatcontrol and tries to force it by 48 new rules.
Everybody should know this by now.

Everbody who is concerned about privacy should avoid al goverment instances.
We can all draw the line what is happening when Murena is getting money from it.
They just buy it and control it.

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It is what it is.
We should all know this.
The EU commission is rollin’ out a totalitarian surveillance agenda.
And Murena is gettin’ part of it by accepting their money.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/eugoingdark-surveillance-plan-timeline-agenda-background/

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the French votation, that clearly rejected ratifying those European instititions, dates back to 2005

We can all draw the line WHY they would fund free software.
To make desicions it is NOT free anymore. (think not as free beer but freedom of speech and freedom)

We know their plans. This is not about privacy for the people but the opposite.

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All please avoid bringing politics into the forum posts. This forum is exclusively for /e/OS related technical discussions. We all have our political ideas and viewpoints. This forum is not the place for such discussions.

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Thank you for the well written and reasoned response.

To think my one time purchase of a FairPhone from Murena will in any fashion support the company beyond a few cups of coffee is ludicrous. There are simply not even of us privacy focused folks to drive that kind of volume of surviving on hardware sales alone.

The amount of time, effort, and costs by others to bring us these privacty options is severely under appreciated.

Where do folks think the money for these privacy projects is coming from? The Privacy Fairy?

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