I’ve used Fastmail for a long time and I’m very happy with it.

While I don’t disagree with this post in spirit, it feels tone deaf. Many very popular and well used FOSS projects rely on one or two core contributors who are volunteering their time to build something useful, fitting that work in alongside their paying work and the rest of their life. If a maintainer of a project I use has 3 hours in between their kid’s baseball game and dinner one Sunday to spend working on it, I’d much rather them spend that time making the project better than on giving pro forma replies to PRs and issues that aren’t valuable to the project to adhere to some sense of decorum (and, as a former maintainer, even a polite “no” to a bad idea or a disguised request for free technical consulting is time consuming).

As a tangent,

Not acknowledging contributions and the work that goes into them, whether through a quick response or a kind word, undermines our entire community. Every time that happens, it’s a “fuck you” towards a contributor. That seems fashionable if we look at the wider society—things are falling apart around us as we burn the planet and let nations get away with exploitation and murder—, but that doesn’t make it acceptable.

is kind of a wild connection to draw given the reality of many (most, I’d argue) FOSS projects. A busy single maintainer prioritizing their limited time by ignoring low effort contributions is in no way like burning the planet.

(maybe the author is implicitly thinking of very large, well resourced projects with sustaining funding and a lot of maintainers, where I think a higher standard might be fair. That’s not really clear from the post, though, and I don’t think it’s accurate to regard those as “the community”, in the same way that we don’t regard Google, Amazon, etc as the entire software industry)

App Tracking Transparency on iOS devices is an interesting test case for this argument. When an app wants to track you, you’re asked in plain language whether you want to be tracked. You can say no. You don’t have to be a savvy user to say no, and the consent is explicit rather than being buried in a EULA that you don’t read. If you say no, the app will likely still work fine. Specific numbers vary, but somewhere between a majority and a vast majority of iOS users opt out when given that choice. How much that costs advertisers is harder to reason about (a lot of the data comes from advertisers themselves, who are hardly unbiased), but the data are at least consistent in arguing that ATT opt outs produce a quantifiable drop in ad engagement (clicks, etc) and ad spend.

I’m personally a big fan of ATT. You shouldn’t have to be a savvy user to opt out of surveillance capitalism. I also don’t personally care that much about how effective online advertising networks are. But I think LG and similar companies are probably not off base to worry about making it possible to cleanly opt out of everything. From their perspective, that wouldn’t be a great outcome.

I don’t have a problem believing it. They have an infinite money supply (to date), the negative consequences of this are borne by other people, and they probably have plenty of leadership from other tech firms who are used to making narrow ROI arguments based on what benefits the company. Easy enough to imagine “hey, let’s unfuck our crawler!” getting dismissed at not a priority.