this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2024
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This is conspiratorial thinking, and it's a fallacy called the Argument from Silence (i.e. asserting intent based on what they didn't say). If I say I'm going to give you a handshake, but you say, "But you didn't promise you won't punch me in the face," most people would recognize that as a ridiculous line of reasoning.
You do you. This doesn't seem all that problematic to me, as I don't need Secrets Manager, and I'll still recommend it to anyone looking for a password manager.
Seems to me that it makes more sense to vilify them when they become villains, not before based on paranoid reasoning that they might.
Not trusting a company that has been quietly undermining open source builds of their android client and being cagey + using guarded and laconic PR speak on this is not fallacious thinking, it is just recognizing behaviors and knowing why a company would be doing that. These companies hire people to craft responses and otherwise manage their "community", and providing no assurances of permanently open clients when they tried to pull this is an intentional omission.
I hate to say this, but there's no real assurances of permanently open clients from anyone. Also, their client is still open, and if they do drop the OSS model, people can just fork it and still have a working client (or fork an old version that meets whatever standards they have).
But unless we can prove that they have actually done something ethically wrong, I don't see why the internet feels the need to waste energy creating villains from conjecture.
*is open again. The clients they distributed were not open source until they open sourced sdk-internal. The fact that you couldn't even build it with only open code even if you wanted to was a bug but that's a rather minor issue in comparison.
I also fully believe that they would not have GPL'd sdk-intenral without public pressure. Even when they were originally called out they were pretty clear that the integration of proprietary code was intentional and done with the knowledge that it would typically violate the GPL.
If you don't see what's ethically wrong with even attempting to subvert the GPL, I don't think you've understood open source.
You might not have read the other comments, but I do QA for a living. Devs fucking up commits is why I continue to have a job. Also, companies/maintainers aren't required to capitulate to every bug report. It's possible that whoever made the original comments didn't understand why it was such a big deal and/or didn't know of an alternative way to structure their software; public pressure made them look a little harder.
Like I said in my first comment: you do you. Bring out the pitchforks. The fact that there's reasonable candidate explanations other than malicious intent says to me that the internet is overreacting—again.
Though, when has the internet ever done that, amirite? /s
That would be a reasonable explanation if we didn't get an admission this was done very much intentionally so, with only the inability to even build being an unintended side-effect from the founder and CTO himself.
I'd invite you to actually read the two comments they made in the thread I linked, I get the feeling that you didn't.