Distributors entering Flatpakland

Distributors entering Flatpakland

As the author aptly notes, it was clear from the start that the very design of flatpak is appealing to proprietary software vendors—unlike traditional distros, which were designed for free software and make it easy to exercise user freedoms, for example with apt-get source. Flatpak’s web site has advertised proprietary apps on its front page for a while now; it should come as no surprise that distros that support it will now provide proprietary software without letting users make informed choices.

The whole “immutable core” thing also looks like poor engineering: does one really want to keep all the low-level software stack frozen in time?

I think we, free software folks, need to address the lack of flexibility of traditional distros that make opaque solutions like flatpak appear necessary. We need to let users know that their autonomy and privacy are at stake (and ours, collectively), let them make informed choices, and design distros for practical user freedom. To me this is very much the mission of Guix.

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