Hi,
who is in charge of maintaining the gnu.org and fsf.org information?
They are, unfortunately, really outdated.
Also how can I get help in case I have a specific question regarding
building from sourcefiles?
Regards,
Nupilios
Hi, late reply, I hope you get this...
I would like to help you, so if you want, tell me, for which os would
you like to build Icecat?
I'm also disappointed that information is outdated and there are no
binary packages to download and run on any platform.
It looks like there is a barrier to who can use Icecat.
Personally I'm a devops/infra engineer and I'm usually good at
debugging and fixing things, but the codebase of Firefox is huge and
there are a lot of things that can go wrong.
I managed to get my debian testing laptop set up for building Icecat,
and after each successful build I upload the debian installer here:
https://github.com/alithechemist/Gnu-Icecat-binary-debian/releases
Of course I wouldn't trust a build coming for an unknown person and
these are mainly for me and some friends, in case it is needed on some
debian based system.
I keep asking myself why is that? Why is it so hard to get Icecat for
someone who understands and share concerns about privacy, big data and
mass surveillance, but at the same time is not a professional developer
or IT-pro, say a lawyer... or a biologist... or an astronomer...
Take a doctor who saves your life, does he ask you to understand
protein biosynthesis? Does a chemist who creates a food preservative
present in your food ask you to understand redox reactions, ions and
the periodic table? When you visit a museum, do you have to dig out all
the archeological finds, carbon date them yourself, etc? Does the
goldsmith asks you about melting point of metals? Do you listen to
music with absolute hear and are you able to tell the key, the cords,
the melody and re-play it by yourself with all instruments at once? Do
you make your own shoes?
This is my naive take on this, probably there are even more very good
reason behind this, some might be that you need to use non free
software to build Icecat for windows, mac os, android.
But at this point, given the current browser landscape, people download
firefox thinking that they are ok surveillance-wise but they are not.
Same for chromium. I believe that liberating Icecat from this hard-to-
get jail would be a good thing for the world and it could even be a
game changer in the culture (or lack of it).
It would be also good to mitigate the number of hilarious alleged
"privacy oriented" forks of Firefox like Waterfox or Librewolf, those
are just tracking your activity as much as Firefox, in some case they
make it even worse sending data to even more companies or companies
that monetize on that data.
Unless... there are reason to keep all this going, to keep the status
quo going.
With the occasion I'd like to offer my work and resources to maintain
an Icecat CD/CI and a repository for all the platforms as well as a
cleaned up version of Chromium, to reduce chances that we run out of
options in case Mozilla decided to keep hammering with amazon ads or
made firefox very hard to fork, and also to let users pick webkit or
Geko.
That thing that might be mistaken with anger is just an endless
enthusiasm for Free Software, and disappointment for the lack a of a
bridge from FSF to the average user.
I also saw that you used Thunderbird, that is bad for your privacy, I
advise about Evolution as it does not phone home like Thunderbird does
every-single-time you use it.
Chippy
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