I didn't know SMT had been lost to an adware company… That's really sad. I'm a big time user of most of the apps in this project! Many of them are very good Android apps even compared to paid alternatives.
I'm especially pissed by this move because I used this project quite a lot in the free software development course that I teach. Many students want to gain experience in mobile development, and helping them make their first open source contribution to this project was a great way for them to learn mobile development and at the same time learn to contribute to an open source project (which requires many skills that are not all related to programming, hence having a specific course). I think we collectively made a dozen of PR last year for reported bugs or requested features in SMT apps.
Now it's like I made my students work for free for a shit company and to be honest I feel disgusted by that.
I'm really glad this fork is a thing, I hope it will work, and I hope the maintainers will be able to continue to publish seamlessly on F-Droid so that the switch is automatic, but I'm not sure that's even possible.
Automatic switch is not possible due to different signatures, which is in fact a good thing. If the Fossify project keeps it running, contribution of your students is not lost at all.
Doesn't F-Droid sign with their key instead of the developers key? (More like the Linux distribution model)
At least I thought that was the reason Signal doesn't like F-Droid, but now we see how this can actually be better. It's a matter of who you trust more.
Yes, but the initial content is signed by the developers key. In fact it's a frequent issue because developers lose, misplace or forget their keys and some manual intervention has to be made (that's where you appreciate a process where humans can talk to each other, something that would be impossible with a store the size of any other commercial store)
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I didn't know SMT had been lost to an adware company… That's really sad. I'm a big time user of most of the apps in this project! Many of them are very good Android apps even compared to paid alternatives.
I'm especially pissed by this move because I used this project quite a lot in the free software development course that I teach. Many students want to gain experience in mobile development, and helping them make their first open source contribution to this project was a great way for them to learn mobile development and at the same time learn to contribute to an open source project (which requires many skills that are not all related to programming, hence having a specific course). I think we collectively made a dozen of PR last year for reported bugs or requested features in SMT apps.
Now it's like I made my students work for free for a shit company and to be honest I feel disgusted by that.
I'm really glad this fork is a thing, I hope it will work, and I hope the maintainers will be able to continue to publish seamlessly on F-Droid so that the switch is automatic, but I'm not sure that's even possible.
Automatic switch is not possible due to different signatures, which is in fact a good thing. If the Fossify project keeps it running, contribution of your students is not lost at all.
Doesn't F-Droid sign with their key instead of the developers key? (More like the Linux distribution model)
At least I thought that was the reason Signal doesn't like F-Droid, but now we see how this can actually be better. It's a matter of who you trust more.
Yes, but the initial content is signed by the developers key. In fact it's a frequent issue because developers lose, misplace or forget their keys and some manual intervention has to be made (that's where you appreciate a process where humans can talk to each other, something that would be impossible with a store the size of any other commercial store)