fossandcrafts-transcriptions/057-f-droid.txt

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CHRISTINE: Hello and welcome to Foss & Crafts.

MORGAN: A podcast about free software, free culture, and making things together.

C: With my co-host, Morgan.

M: And my co-host, Christine.

C: Well, what are we talking about today?

M: Today we are talking about F-Droid, and we have two guests with us today. And I realize we did not talk in our planning session about how you guys want to be introduced on this podcast.

C: Well, I guess I'll just start off the introductions because actually in a certain sense, Morgan is also a guest on this episode since all three of you have the expertise here. And I'm just a community user of your fine software. Why don't we start off since Morgan's usually co-host and this time is kind of interviewee, why don't we start off with Morgan, and then we'll get to our two other guests. Morgan, why are you an interviewee on this episode?

M: Well, part of the reason we're doing this episode right now is because we just finished setting up an organization behind the F-Droid project, including a Board. And I am now officially the chair of the F-Droid Board.

C: Awesome, congratulations. And let's introduce our two guests. Let's start with Sylvia. Sylvia, would you like to introduce yourself?

SYLVIA VON OS: Yeah, hi, I'm Sylvia von Os. I use she/her. I'm a Linux sysadmin by trade and in my spare time I like to help in the open source communities. I develop a few apps of my own as a hobby. I basically joined F-Droid because I really care about what it stands for, and I think it's an extremely important project.

C: Very good. And Hans, would you like to introduce yourself?

HANS-CHRISTOPH STEINER: Yeah, sure. I'm Hans-Christoph Steiner. I think fundamentally I'm here because I am a free software activist. And what that has meant is that I have worked for a long time to try and spend all my time working on free software and try to help as many people work on free software as well. And I came to F-Droid because I was working with the Guardian Project on privacy and free software in mobile. We saw, actually I think it was actually Nathan, one of the founders of Guardian Project who first said, "Hey, I found this thing, F-Droid. It's like, you know, free software for Android". And to me, it was just at that point just a given that I would maybe somehow get involved.

C: On that note, we've mentioned F-Droid several times, but we have not explained to our audience what F-Droid is. I'm going to point--Sylvia, would you like to explain what F-Droid is to a listener of our show who may be interested but not familiar?

S: In its simplest form, F-Droid is a repository of free software apps. Think of, on a Linux system or what many people call an app store nowadays. But it's actually also a lot more than that. It's also a whole distribution system. It's an app to interact with those repositories. But I think for someone who's completely new to F-Droid, the thing I would tell them is that F-Droid is a way to get free software applications on your Android phone.

C: You mentioned that there's a lot more components to it. And of course there's always a lot of components that people don't see under the hood. For example, I installed one thing called F-Droid on my computer. There is a whole build system to be able to get each one of those packages so that I'm able to download it, right? Because if I remember correctly, you don't just accept whatever binary upload that people give you, you actually make sure that you can compile it.

S: Yeah, that's true. F-Droid builds pretty much everything straight from source code, and there are a lot of scripts to ensure that every part of an app is actually free software to ensure it doesn't drag in closed source or proprietary dependencies. It's all just done to make sure that what users get is actually completely free software as people would expect. And making sure we're building everything from source. And in some cases, with a recent introduction of reproducible builds, which kind of always existed in F-Droid, but we're rolling out more and more now, we're even able to nowadays create like bit-for-bit identical versions of apps that the developer publishes to give also extra trust that what the developer publishes and what is the actual source code, that that matches as well. So there's a lot of cool stuff happening there.

C: Yeah, so I'm involved in Guix, which is G-U-I-X, which is along with I think Debian and Guix, and I hadn't really thought about F-Droid. I guess they're all kind of pushing hard on the reproducibility side of things that we should care about being able to make sure that the software that we are getting in terms of its binary output is really the software as it is in source code form, that there's a one-on-one correspondence. So I actually didn't know that F-Droid was very active in doing that. I think that's really awesome. So what problem does F-Droid solve?

M: Well, increasingly as technology has become more and more prevalent in everyone's lives, access to be able to change and modify that technology has become increasingly more difficult to do. So F-Droid solves the problem of how do we have all of the benefits of these mobile devices, which are tiny computers that we can carry everywhere, but still be able to use them ethically with free software options on them in a way that you don't necessarily have to be a free software developer in order to make it happen.

C: And actually, for the last 10 years, I think about every time we've gotten a new Android-y type device, the first thing we do if we're not reflashing the device itself, and certainly if we are afterwards, is either we install something that already has F-Droid on it or we install F-Droid on it so that we can start installing software from there. And it's always our preference to use something that we can get via F-Droid within our own household. So yeah, that's pretty exciting.

M: And I've been using F-Droid longer than I've been a free software advocate even.

C: That's true. I think that the first machine we installed F-Droid on was your tablet that you got over a decade ago. Is that right?

M: So yeah, then probably my first tablet.

C: So tell me about the history of F-Droid. How did this project start, and how did it grow into what it is today?

H: I wasn't there at the very beginning, but I followed it for a long time. The project was founded by Ciaran Gultnieks, and hopefully I'm doing his name justice, in 2010. And I think a lot of people then, especially people who use free software, were excited by Android because it was open source. And back then the mobile ecosystem was so closed and so locked down, it was hard even just to develop your own apps. It came out of that. And it was really, I think, Ciaran, just he started it by himself, because it was something he wanted. And it struck a chord. And for me, it was quite interesting to see, because he quite quickly laid out some ideas that weren't around that I at least was not familiar with in other free software distributions. And that is that software should also be reviewed for things that are not necessarily related to free software. It is known as anti-features. So for example, if an app tracks you, so it can be entirely free software and include tracking or advertising. These are things that are not necessarily in the user's interest, but under the standard of free software say laid out by the Free Software Foundation, or for user freedoms, it does count as free software. From that, it was something on the internet. Some people got involved. There was, I don't know, Paul Falcon, maybe was his name, was somewhat an early contributor. And then Daniel Martí was very involved for many years. And there really isn't anything else like this on mobile phones, where someone is taking a free software distro like Debian and applying these core principles of operation to mobile apps.

C: You could try to do something like run a Pinephone or a Librem 5 or something like that. And it is possible to run some kind of more, let's say, GNU/Linux-y flavors of operating systems with some mobile stuff. And I've tried doing that many times. And since the N900 have been trying to return to that. But I guess the N900 was the only device I ever had where I feel like that actually felt somewhat good. And since then, for whatever reason, the world of operating systems on what we think of as mobile devices has really been, if you want what feels like a polished experience, it's really only been either iOS, which is completely proprietary, or either Android or some community build of Android. And that's kind of it.

H: Yeah, I mean, to go on that point, I was a user of Maemo, which is like, and I forget 8, NA10, I think it was called. But the same idea, these were modeled, actually, really built on top of Debian tooling. But as much as I like the Nokia Maemo devices and all that, they never set any kind of core principle like this is only free software. It was just like, "Oh, look, we're using Debian, and we'll throw in--" A lot of it was proprietary. There were no borders between what was proprietary and what was free software.

C: Not only that, years later, it turned out that the web browser that shipped on the N900 was actually man-in-the-middling all TLS traffic.

H: Okay, I didn't know that.

C: Yeah, I was a little bit scared when I read that one.

H: Yeah.

C: Anyway, sorry, that's a digression. But yes, you're right that even having a GNU/Linux-y-type baseline doesn't mean that the system is actually kind of really pushing for or aiming for freedom-oriented principles at the core, which, F-Droid certainly is. And I think you're right that it's very interesting to highlight that in F-Droid when I'm going to install something, the "you might not like this" set of things is actually often highlighted. And that can be interesting because I think the place where I most often see that is if I'm installing something like, I don't know if Telegram's still on it, but at one point, I installed Telegram back in the day, and it was like, "Oh, this is using a centralized service." So if you're not a fan of that, you might not be a fan of this. Right? So, yeah, I think it's good to kind of push the direction of user freedom.

M: And it also allows you to set your comfort level for what you want it to be, right? Because you might be okay with using a centralized service. That might not be your primary concern, but it tells you just in case you're not.

C: So tell me about some of the features of F-Droid.

S: Well, okay, so one of the main features of F-Droid--I kind of touched on that like earlier already--is the repositories model. By default, F-Droid has the F-Droid.org repository pre-configured, but you can also add other repositories. For example, there are third-party repositories like the Izzy repository that contains a lot of almost completely libre software. Just some proprietary dependencies here and there that are like not fit for the main F-Droid repository. Several developers host their own repository, so you can get earlier updates for their app like test versions and stuff like that. And it also kind of helps to prevent F-Droid from being like the sole arbiter. Because if we ever end up doing something that people don't like, people could just like run their own repositories. They're not dependent on us. And I think that's a really important thing to preserve the freedom of free software to try to limit the dependencies on certain people as much as possible.

H: I think, yeah, and adding to that, I think one of the things that we've also become known for is a focus on privacy. Which is not necessarily, you know, is also one of these things that it's, you know, you're allowed to track people and invade people's privacy under the principles of free software. But users don't want that. And so we want to provide that because we are also all users of this.

C: That makes sense. So the F-Droid project recently also has developed the F-Droid Organization. We talked about that at the beginning of this episode by mentioning that Morgan is Chair of the F-Droid Board. So tell me more about that. What is the F-Droid organization? Why would you, I mean, if the project has been running for quite a long time without this kind of organization in place, what's the motivation to do it now? What are the goals of having that organization? And yeah, what kind of things are it tackling?

M: So there are some things [where] it's just easier to have a set structure in place to do things like trademark registration. Since F-Droid has a very broad community of contributors, previously there wasn't a single person or entity that could register trademark. And that has led to, you know, some offshoots of things that are not actually F-Droid, but are using F-Droid the name and the branding to give different products. One of the things is to have an entity that we can do those things under, including a Board that was appointed by the community. And I think all of us on the Board are viewing this as a service role where we are here to serve the community and help kind of guide decisions in a way that we don't necessarily need the long bikeshedding community discussions for every single decision. But we can still take community input on those things.

H: For the longest time F-Droid ran, just, you know, it was technical people who say like, I want this, and it should exist. And therefore, you know, if not me then who. So people have just stepped up and worked on it. And, you know, as it got bigger and bigger, I mean, I think, I think all along people who contributed thought, okay, this will be great if you know this is something for everyone. You know, it's like, well, making something for everyone involves a lot of hard things that we don't know anything about.

C: What's an example of that?

H: Like, well, so like the legal process of getting a trademark, you know, we are managing donations. Like we started to get donations, you know, not really even asking for them. And we're like, oh, cool. People want to support the project. This is great. But like, none of us know how to run a campaign, how to do accounting, how to like handle, you know, like this kind of stuff. So it was like, oh, you know, now we actually have money in the bank, and we don't really know how to spend it in a way that we're comfortable with. We need, you know, there needs to be people who do know this or who do want to tackle this. And, you know, it just seems also part of the progression of as a free software project, community project like this kind of becomes like an infrastructure for so many people, then it needs to have its own entity. To me, that's where it started. I know Ciaran at one point started a UK based company called F-Droid Limited and as donations were coming in, you have to have a legal home for them and that's where it was run for there. But then I think he just ultimately found it to be too much and not something he felt comfortable dealing with. And so then something like Commons Conservancy, which is how we're incorporated, it seems to really fit how the F-Droid community was working.

C: So just to be clear that Commons Conservancy is an umbrella organization. It exists out of, I think it's based in the EU. Is that right?

H: In the Netherlands.

C: In the Netherlands. Yeah. And so there are a few different of these kinds of umbrella organizations. There's, you know, Software Freedom Conservancy. There's Commons Conservancy, not the same, you know, they have similar names. And there's to some degree, you could say to some degree the FSF being the fiscal sponsor of GNU. It's kind of like that. And there's also Software in the Public Interest and a few other things like that. So basically, you all made the decision to go with a fiscal sponsor-type model to be under an umbrella organization. Can you actually tell me, what was the thinking behind that? Why do that instead of starting your own organization?

M: Well, part of that decision is that it's a lot harder to just start our own organization. This way, we have some of that background admin stuff already taken care of that we don't have to worry about. So that puts less stress on the Board.

H: Based on just a number of private conversations with a number of contributors, I think a lot of us have been involved in startups and business and felt a little bit abused by the kind of business side of things. And--

C: You decided to not start a venture capitalist-based version of F-Droid?

H: (Laughs) That's for sure. But also, these kinds of legal structures kind of felt very similar. And so a lot of us--I don't know, I could speak for myself for sure. And other people--they're private conversations, so it won't name names--felt very wary about doing some kind of legal thing like this, and we wanted to make sure that there's some principles here that cannot be violated, like these free software principles, that someone can't buy it out and then turn F-Droid into something else. And to me, that's what Commons Conservancy is basically this extra layer of like, yes, it's we have an entity, we have our own Board of F-Droid. But then we have this extra layer in Commons Conservancy that, like, you not only have to convince the Board, but you also have to convince the Commons Conservancy and their structures, if you're ever going to try to force it away from the core founding principles. And so that to me was a big attractive point of how we set up.

C: That's an interesting point that I think isn't really mentioned very often when talking about umbrella organizations, that they can provide that kind of layer of already pre-baked values in some ways, right? You can do that yourself, you know, so Spritely has its own nonprofit. We decided to go the route of creating our own nonprofit. And we had to do a lot of that work of, you know, like, what are the values of this organization? How do we encode that in our founding documents and so on and so forth. But it can be really helpful if somebody's already done that work, you know, it's kind of like, I guess it's not quite the same, but, you know, maybe kind of similar to, well, we don't have to write our own license, you know, somebody's already done the work ahead of us as in terms of thinking through what the implications of this are. Yeah, so that's interesting. So, and who else is on the Board?

M: So we've got a pretty solid Board of heavy hitters in the free and open source software communities. I myself am the Chair. We have John Sullivan as the Vice Chair, Michael Downey as the Treasurer, Andrew Lewman at Clerk. And then we've also got Matthias Kirschner and Max Mehl who don't have official roles on the Board, but are Board members. So I feel like we've got a really solid group of people with a lot of really in-depth background in the free and open source software communities on our team.

C: So earlier when talking about the Board serving a role in terms of setting policies, I'm just, I'm just kind of curious. Are there any interesting examples of policies that are already being considered for the Board to be involved in? Or is that kind of something to be fleshed out later as the Board kind of grows and evolves?

M: So we're still pretty early on in having this Board set up, but our first really in depth project as a Board, or actually before we were technically a Board was to put together a really in-depth set of statutes and rules and regulations that establish kind of the baseline policies that the Board will have moving forward. But I think it's important to again say that most of the actual direction of the F-Droid project is still going to be continued through the F-Droid community. So I'm going to hand this off to Sylvia.

S: So one common thing with policy is that there are also things where legal issues get involved, and that's pretty much when a Board can be extremely helpful. For example, we're kind of still struggling a bit with a good policy on dealing with NSFW content. There are some people who kind of don't want it associated with F-Droid at all. There are some others who think that it's good to have free software apps for these things. But that's also just the whole legal issues regarding who can access it under different laws in different countries. Just think of adult material or gambling related things, and it's the kind of thing that gets extremely complex. And those are the kind of legal issues where a Board with legal expertise would be a great asset to have.

M: And also having a Board that is an entity that can hire a lawyer as opposed to a free software project where you would have to have an individual member of the team probably contact a lawyer. It's helpful to have that as well.

S: Exactly.

C: So being a kind of facilitating thing, I think in some ways a lot of interesting pieces of software end up being about facilitation. So we have facilitation being on the organizational level, but in some ways software can encode facilitation itself. So in a sense, F-Droid is kind of a piece of facilitation software for me because when I install it, there's a lot of things that I have to think about less. I don't have to figure out how to compile all these things. I don't have to assess each one of these things. So I can kind of rely on those skills and governance.

M: So this came up as a topic of conversation in last night's community event, which, if I'm going to mention it, I might as well plug that Foss & Crafts hosts twice-monthly community events called Hack & Craft. So at our Hack & Craft last night, we were discussing the increasing difficulty in actually setting up free software on your devices, even if you are getting a device that is, you know, open hardware or intended to be foss compatible.

C: Right. Actually last night. I was trying to do a little bit of an unusual setup with the way that I was installing Guix on my new computer, I was getting kind of frustrated and disappointed with myself for having difficulty setting things up in the way that I wanted. And thankfully they do have an installer that was able to help me out because it used to be very easy, I used to know the whole process for doing like a manual installation of all these things when it was the old school master boot record installation of things, but now that we have like the EFI based installation things, I kind of always forget how to do that right. And so I got frustrated, and I gave up on my own kind of customization thing and was kind of disparaging myself. And I kind of led you to jump in with some comments and kind of kicked off some conversation internally.

M: Yeah, especially since--Christine might not appreciate me saying this on the podcast--but I think by most people's standards, Christine is pretty clearly an expert on free and open source software, she's been working in free and open source software for over a decade, she has installed GNU/Linux distributions on dozens of personal computers and laptops and hundreds of servers. So the fact that Christine as an expert is having trouble with these things doesn't--it says something for people who are not experts.

C: Yeah, so it's been helpful every time we've had a computer where we want to run an Android-like thing we can just install F-Droid. And, you know, I know that there was some discussion by Sylvia in terms of, you know, what are the policies that should exist in there and, you know, how do we deal with these types of things, but having an organization that's kind of done some of that work up front, it allows me to kind of worry and stress less. And I think that it's great that we have that on an Android-like system because I feel like that's been a real value that I've felt like, you know, GNU/Linux distributions conventionally have [provided] for a really long time. So it's good to see it here. But I think actually that might tie in with something that's kind of interesting as in terms of a difference with F-Droid from other systems is that F-Droid is a package manager, it does not supply the underlying operating system, right? You know, like if you're installing Debian, it's doing both, right? And you can run stuff like Nix and Guix uses base package managers. But in general, a lot of what they're doing is really providing kind of the whole system for you. So, I was wondering if any of you had comments about not providing the whole thing, you know, providing this layer of abstraction on top of a system that's kind of already pre-built.

S: Well, personally, I would, I personally don't think it's actually that that much different from like a GNU/Linux distro because even there, like the team that's working on the tooling for apps, for example, isn't necessarily the same team that's working on some of the other tooling. And we've kind of just found a team that can work well on the tooling for the package management part. And there are other people who make custom Android ROMs, for example, who are really good at the operating system part. So I think in that way, it's all just parts that get combined, just like all the GNU stuff got combined with the Linux kernel into a functional system.

H: Yeah, totally, like Lineage is the base system and, you know, for one example, or CalyxOS, not the one we work closely with. And then F-Droid is the Apt, is the package manager. But there is the one, I think what Christine kind of what you're getting on is what's weird about the Android ecosystem is that Android OS is this, you know, free open source operating system, but it's really, I mean, clearly majority controlled by Google and yes, the source code is all there. But it's like, you know, Google puts a lot of work into it. And it is hard even to maintain a fork you know, something like a fork like Lineage. And so it still takes quite a bit of work to keep up. And especially the way that Google structures the Android development, they don't develop in public. They basically, every release, they kind of say, "Oh, here's the release". They just throw the source code over the wall. And then they go back to operating largely in, you know, largely in secret. If you install something like CalyxOS or Lineage from microG, you have the GNU/Linux distro experience, you know, F-Droid is built-in and it just works and it's all integrated. If you bought a phone that is a typical, you know, Google Android phone, then you're installing F-Droid separately. And then it has this weird dynamic of feeling kind of, you know, separate and not very not integrated. Yeah. And unfortunately, for most non-technical users, that's their user experience.

M: But that does give us the benefit of having a "meet them where they are" situation because it would be really hard to convince someone who is not a free and open source software user in general to just flash their phone and start with a completely free software operating system on their phone. But saying, "Hey, if you download F-Droid, then you can, just get specific apps that are free and open source software", but you don't necessarily have to give up all of the apps that you're used to.

C: And in fact, on our latest phones, Morgan and I specifically got some phones that we believed we would be able to reinstall the entire operating system. And we did not realize they are locked such that--and there's no current jail-breaking process--that we just can't replace the entire underlying operating system. So we kind of sighed and threw up our hands and put F-Droid on them. And we're at least able to have free software from that layer on up. But it was disappointing that we couldn't replace the base operating system. It felt at least like, well, at least we can--for the main things we're using day to day, we're able to use free software from this layer on up.

M: I think in general, the device manufacturers, so the hardware of cell phones, we tend to be working with either Android from the kind of official, mostly-produced-by-Google-sense or iOS with iPhones. And the device manufacturers in general do not care about whether or not you can modify your operating system. And in fact, a lot of times, those manufacturers are somewhat hostile towards changing your operating systems because the phones that we purchased were even unlocked phones, which historically have been devices that you can change the operating systems on. But there are procedures in place to make that not always possible.

C: Yeah, it turned out they were unlocked in terms of the carrier, but not in terms of the operating system, which was pretty frustrating.

H: Well, I think that that highlights the most important avenue, which is also one that takes time and is not very visible. And that is that working with hardware providers that do care. And there are starting to be some--Fairphone, another Linux-based one--I think they only really sell in Europe--Did ship a version for a while with F-Droid in it? They are also a small--I think they didn't have the resources going after a while, but we still continue to talk to them. And then there's another company, a small company, called Shift--Shift Phones. There's also--we're working with them to ship a phone. The idea is that you go to a store and buy the phone. And it comes with free software Google-free with F-Droid built in. And from these processes of talking to these manufacturers, we've also learned about the hoops that Google makes these manufacturers jump through. And that's part of actually what was blocking companies from shipping free software ROMs as an option even. So it's been exciting to see this new EU law called the Digital Markets Act, which is going to--it aims to regulate exactly this. And I somehow found my way in the European Commission's event with Google and Apple, VPs and all sorts of government regulators. And it was interesting to be able to offer the free software perspective on this. And it made me optimistic that actually it's, I think, coming pretty soon that we will be able to buy phones [unintelligible].

C: Hans, earlier you mentioned that the way that you got involved was the Guardian Project. Could you mention and explain a little bit more what the Guardian Project is and the ways in which that plays into F-Droid and maybe the ways in which it's maybe over-assumed to play into F-Droid?

H: Yeah, sure. Guardian Project did not start or found F-Droid, which is sometimes reported. Yeah, so what Guardian Project is, is we started--is founded by Nathan Freitas. So in 2008, he's worked in mobile technology since the '90s. And he wanted to do something based on private phones and also was inspired by the open source nature of Android. We met through a mutual friend. And there's some other--others involved in--and actually, ironically, we started in 2009 kind of with the idea that we would be a startup because we were naively assuming that startups would want to fund a free software smartphone that did not compromise in privacy. I mean, this was pre-Snowden leak. So we did actually talk to VCs even. And they were like, oh, you're going to get very valuable data that you can sell. And we're like, that's exactly what we don't want to do. But we were in the right place at the right time. And the US State Department had started this new effort that they call Internet Freedom. And they started funding lots of development, focused on privacy. So Tor is a famous example. And we got to make a living focusing on uncompromising privacy in mobile apps. And it's kind of run since then. And for us, with our free software base in Guardian Project, F-Droid had been a natural place to be, Guardian Project has this kind of structure--since 2008 we've been getting grants to write free software focused on privacy and run these grants and things like that. And so we've done that also for F-Droid projects. And so when we can make a case to funders to say--usually funding has come from this Internet Freedom perspective. So that means making sure that it can't be censored, making sure that it has strong privacy protections, things like that. We've tried to get big chunks of development funding that can apply and support F-Droid when possible. And I guess the tricky part is that I think it's very important that F-Droid remain a community controlled project. And so money can warp that. But money also means that people can make a living--spend years of time--working on things. And so that's--actually, we were talking about the Board--to me, that's something I think a Board will pay a key role in saying the Board controls what can be called F-Droid and what not. And that gives oversight over when someone says, "look, someone just gave me a million bucks to do this with F-Droid" That is a big counterweight to say, OK, but this has to actually improve F-Droid, not just your grant goals.

C: Right, right. Good. One of the other things that I think is really important about having F-Droid is that earlier, I think, Sylvia was talking about how it's important that there's not just one sole arbiter of things. But one example of an app store that does have a sole app provider is Google with Google Play, which is usually how if somebody is getting stock Android or manufacturer modified Android from whatever their devices is that they're buying, they're usually installing things in the Google Play store. And there is a pretty well-known example a couple of years ago where the Google Play store ended up banning Matrix, their application element. Does anybody want to talk about that and maybe how that type of stuff plays in?

S: Yeah, so the thing with Matrix, I believe that was because there was one person spreading some messy messages over the app and Google taking down the entire app instead of properly contacting the Matrix team. That kind of shows like two issues. At first, it shows the issue with the sole arbiter thing again, because Google has so much power. They can pretty much shut down your entire business or community if you do anything they don't like, or if something goes wrong. And I think F-Droid makes it a bit less of an issue because we have the ability to add third party repositories. However, we do also have like F-Droid.org as a main repository included by default, which means we do have to watch this a bit. And while we do have policies against hateful content, one thing I also noticed is that our review process is a lot different. For example, I have personally had cases where I have had app updates for my own app rejected on Google Play for not providing login info, despite my app being fully offline. And on the other hand, I see on the F-Droid side, I see our contributors just sometimes grabbing tooling like net cards to check network connections to make sure the apps don't track, sometimes even looking at bits of code. I think the free software nature of the apps on F-Droid also allow for much more thorough and meaningful app reviews. And we sometimes actually see people do this. And I think our community is really strong in that. And I'm really proud of how everyone looks through stuff to make sure it's well-reviewed.

C:And if they want to become a contributor to F-Droid, as in terms of the software itself, how would they go about doing that?

H: Well, so there's a lot of different ways to get involved. And more and more even ways for less-technical people to get involved. If you find the source code of an app that you want to see in F-Droid, we have our RFP, the Request For Packaging issue tracker. And you just need to post the link to the source code in the issue tracker. And then we ask as much information as you can figure out. But most importantly, is the link to the source code. And that starts the process of being-- of the app being reviewed and getting included into F-Droid. So just finding good apps and finding that link to the source code is a key contribution. It starts the process. You can also review those. So we have something called IssueBot that just tries to automatically detect some things and post it as a comment in the issue. And you kind of just skim those. That probably, if you're non-technical, would probably look pretty intimidating. But if you've worked with software-- any kind of software, I imagine it should be pretty easy to look at it. You don't necessarily have to have Android experience. Then one thing that's dear to me--some of these policies are really important and often require research. For example, this long NSFW, not-safe-for-work discussion, just having the research of how do laws apply to internet community that spread all over the world, where we didn't really know that. I don't think we still have a good sense of that. That would be a super valuable conversation because the laws around things like images of naked adults vary really widely around the world. And even the countries that our core contributors are based on, there's some pretty big differences. Then the last, of course, is the classic we're a free software project and all of its free software. And we want developers to contribute as well. And there are lots of issues that are tagged, "help wanted". That's probably the best place to start. Sylvia you have anything to add to that?

S: Yeah, I do want to add that with getting your app on F-Droid, while the process may seem intimidating at first, I've seen the community be extremely helpful in guiding developers through it. Our core data contributors are pretty much always right there and also help work with people to figure out what proprietary type dependencies they may have accidentally included in their app to help free that up. And often they'll also work with you to try to make your app build reproducibly, if possible. So that way people could even update your app from outside of F-Droid. For example, if you want to send someone an update, just for a test version or whatever, they should be able to update right to your test version of the app because if an app is built reproducibly, we can use that signature. So there's a lot of possibilities. There's a lot of working together. And while it seems very intimidating and complex at first, some of you may know that I have written a few apps in the past, I found getting them on F-Droid actually, in some cases, easier than publishing them to Google Play. So it's really not as bad as it seems. It's scary at first, but it's a nice helpful community. And in general, I don't think most people should have much trouble with it.

C: I think this is really great. As said, I'm a user of F-Droid. I'm not really involved in any of the development or any of that. But I do occasionally go through and read kind of the forum of issues. And one of the things that really does impress me is just how many people are involved there. But I'm really grateful that we have, well, three representatives of that community here on the call, with Morgan and Hans and Sylvia, all talking here. So now I'm going to ask all three of you, the usual question that we ask guests, including Morgan this time, what are you crafting? And that can include handmade projects or artwork or anything, or even hobby coding projects.

S: Well, my main project currently is Catima, which stands for Card and Ticket Manager, which is a loyalty card, other ticket app for Android, which is also available on F-Droid. I started it because I was looking around, like for apps to store all this kind of stuff in. And the ones I used to find were just all extremely proprietary and so much tracking. And I just didn't want to deal with that. I found a small project on F-Droid called Loyalty Card Keychain by Brandon Archer, who sadly, at a certain point, he stopped developing this. And I decided to fork the app after talking with the developer. And yes, since then, I'm accidentally an app developer now. So life works in mysterious ways. But for those interested, you can find Catima in F-Droid. So yeah, and otherwise, I just look wherever else I can help with cool open source stuff when I have the time.

C: Very cool. What about you, Hans?

H: So I live in a big city, other than Vienna. And at least where I live, it has a lot of street trees. And I don't know what the official word for it is. In German, it's Baumscheibe. And I think it's a tree pit in English. And basically, you have this area of dirt underneath a tree in the city. And in my neighborhood, for whatever reason, the city--there just seems to be a war on anything living in them. And I'm trying to reverse that. Because there's just wonderful pieces of dirt that could be beautiful plants and flowers. So the fun part of it is actually getting down there digging. I actually go hiking--I'll just go off into the woods or something. And I see an interesting plant. And I'll dig it out and move it to some of the tree pits.

M: Awesome.

H: Yeah. And so my goal maybe is a little different than most gardeners'. I want a little piece of woods right outside my door. So that's why I go to find the native plants and stick them in.

M: Also good for biodiversity in an urban environment, too.

H: Yeah. Yeah. I actually built also window boxes and all, because I live on like an upper floor. And it's been fascinating to see now--and also there's little classic little things of holes drilled in them for insect houses. And now we have a whole little bee and ladybug ecosystem where we've been able to--so with my kids, we've seen a couple generations. Because you can see the little holes fill up with mud, and then something comes out, and then you see the different bees and ladybugs. And my sister-in-law is a--what do you call it? The bug--

M: Entomologist?

H: Yes. Thank you.

C: I was going to joke, well, I'm guessing you're not taking--you're not also making spaces for the animals directly and stuff like that. But then you jumped in directly with the way that you actually are. So-- Yeah.

H: For bugs, yeah. Yeah. So we did actually-- we were able to identify--I learned what a baby ladybug looks like. And I was like, what is this weird looking black thing? And my sister-in-law was like, that's a ladybug. I forget the term, but baby. And then we had ladybugs. So that's been quite cool to see-- yeah, actually a little ecosystem starting to form.

C: Very cool. All right. And Morgan, what are you crafting?

M: Anyone who's gone to Hack and Craft recently already knows this. But my big project since December has been making socks. So within the last few years, I've developed an allergy to all synthetic fabrics, which is terrible because finding clothes with no synthetic fabrics in it is really difficult. And I've been able to find things that can work for most of my wardrobe, but finding commercially-available socks that have no spandex or polyester or anything of that type in it is almost impossible. So in December, I taught myself how to make socks. I just finished my 12th pair of socks last week.

H: Wow.

M: Once I get started on a new craft thing, I tend to hyperfixate. So I've now gotten to the point where I have enough socks that I've made that I can just wear socks that I won't have an allergic reaction to. And I don't have to do a hand wash load of socks every couple of days. So that's exciting.

H: I definitely appreciate that. I have a lover of wool socks, like the classic old--

M: Yeah.

H: So this is like next level then.

M: It's a lot easier than I thought it would be. I've pretty much been afraid of making socks for most of my life. I think there was an American Girl Book where one of the plot lines is that they all started making socks for the troops and then realized that making socks is hard. So they gave up and they just all sewed their little patches of unfinished socks together into blankets instead. And I'm like, well, I'm never making socks because the American girls can't do it. So I guess I can't either. And my mom also made it sound really hard. So getting over that mental block has actually been really good.

C: Very good. Well, I think that's it. Thank you all for being on this show. It was wonderful having you all.

H: Yeah, thanks for having us.

S: Yeah, it was nice to be here. Thanks.

M: Yeah, I appreciate both of you being here. And Christine, thank you for being the interviewer on your own this time.

C: You know what? It was a lot of fun. All right. Thanks, everybody. Bye!

M: All right. Thanks. Bye.

S: Bye.

H: Bye.

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C: Foss and Crafts is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 International License.

M: It's hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber.

C: The intro music is composed by Christine Lemmer-Webber (meaning myself), in MilkyTracker. And it's released under the same license as the show.

M: The outro music is Enchanted Tiki 86, composed by Alex Smith of the Cynic Project, and is waived into the public domain under CC0 1.0. See https://CynicMusic.com for more information.

C: You can get in contact with us on the Fediverse, @FossAndCrafts@octodon.social, on Twitter at @FossAndCrafts, or you can email us at podcast@fossandcrafts.org.

M: We also have a chat room. Join our community on #fossandcrafts on irc.libera.chat.

C: If you'd like to support the show, you can donate at https://patreon.com/FossAndCrafts.

M: That's it for this week.

C: Until next time, stay free.

M: And stay crafty.

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C: Very grud. And--[chuckling] "very grud". Very good!