Just one example, I've used Material Files for years and it has quite a few features not found in Simple File Manager.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fossify.gallery/
Thanks to this debacle, I'll actually be trying it out.
What I have used out of Simple Mobile Tools is the Dialer. It allowed me to make my old phone usable for calls again. The phone, which runs an outdated release of LineageOS and doesn't receive updates, developed a problem. The screen would turn off when dialing or on a call. This prevented one from even hanging up. I experimentally installed Simple Dialer to see if the dialer app was the cause. (Because Simple Dialer was on F-Droid, and I had heard about Simple Mobile Tools.) It didn't help on its own. Then I went through the settings and saw one that disabled the proximity sensor during calls. I tried turning on the setting, and that did it.
This apparently used to be an option in the AOSP phone app: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/80227/phone.... Simple Dialer has been forked as https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Phone.
I use the first one on a daily basis.
[0]: https://github.com/IacobIonut01/Gallery
[1]: https://github.com/lineage-next/android_packages_apps_Glimps...
Scrolling is a bit choppy unfortunately, though.
Their default Gallery app is adequate for my needs and integrates well with the camera and messaging app and has never nagged me to upgrade to the "pro" version.
I'm pretty sure it is a modified version from Android open source/Lineage.
Because a lot of people use those apps and are familiar with them. While it isn't difficult to replace them it could be quite faffy evaluating alternatives, making sure they work the same (or better), are reliable, aren't hiding gotchas like also being stalk-ware, etc.
Seems that the original author recieved some external contribution in GPLv3.
Basically, I can't copyright an "article" which only says "This is an article." — there is high probability of someone coming up with the exact same wording, so you can't get protections for it. How much is too much is definitely left up to the interpretation.
Finally, unless one of those contributors takes him to court (external party like EFF or FSF can't protect your rights, you have to do it yourself), it's unlikely he should care. If one or two people do, there's also a relatively cheap option of rewriting just those parts too: court won't try to challenge other possible license issues.
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.
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.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.simplemobiletools.calend...
https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issu...
The fact remains that the sale wasn't announced and many users found it inadvertently. Many more may still be unaware that the apps they believe to be open source have turned into spyware/deceptiveware. The author seems to have sold the privacy of unsuspecting users to a spyware company. The situation isn't as simple or innocent as 'I wrote most of the code so I have the right to do it.
It's extremely annoying when open source software terms are changed and the authors downplay the impact like this. It also applies to other cases like browser extensions and cloud software. Besides privacy, they also disregard the contributions and promotions others make.
Naveen, are you on HN?
[0] https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/Simple-Music-Player/com...
I wish you the best and hope you get enough community financial support to continue the project indefinitely.
GitHub does not show forked repositories in search results, and I recall reading an article that forked repositories got deleted when the user gets blocked by the original author (though I can't find the exact article).
