I’m asking this because one time, while browsing the GNU website, I noticed that some of the members’ emails had “gmail” on them!! And I asked myself how would that be possible?? And I think other members of the FSF had Gmail too. Why? Richard Stallman is against Gmail, so why would those memberse use it?? Would that mean I can use non-free software while advocating and loving free/libre software??
You can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Free Software isn’t a religion. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Assuming this isn’t a troll post, why wouldn’t it be possible? Not everything has an open source alternative that’s nearly as good. I use Linux, I like open source, but I still use Discord and google services and occasionally a bunch of other closed source apps like Steam. Not everything ever made has to be open source.
this is so obviously a troll account that it’s painful to see no one else questioning it
ok thank you, I understand!! What matters is promoting libre software!! u By the way, Richard Stallman doesn’t say open source.
I mean, it’s not like slavery or murder.
Being pro-FOSS does not mean you are anti proprietary software. There’s plenty of middle ground.
Video games, for example, where the company might not want to open source their server code for plenty of very legitimate reasons.
Mail is a super important utility. For physical mail, it’s a felony for anybody to open it. For digital mail, gmail open, reads, and inserts ads before handing it to you. It’s ok to think some things are important enough to mandate FOSS, and some things not.
Using free software is the important part, IMO. Not using non-free software is a good wishlist item. But of course there are those who differ with me. :)
but Richard Stallman himself uses a completely free (libre) laptop and even his GNU/Linux distro is 100% free, so he is living by his example!! But ok, can I still use Discord and promote free software?? Woa >u<
Use whatever you like, there is no rule book that says you have to do this or that.
The goal is freedom, right? Be free.
I mean, ever tried hosting your own email server in ${CURRENT_YEAR}? Might as well write those mails to a thumb drive and throw it out of the window.
I haven’t. What happens?
Unless you jump through a crazy number of hoops, your domain just gets blacklisted by every spam filter under the sun.
At best all your sent mail goes to junk, at worst it is just blocked altogether.
Convincing the popular small services to not mark new mail services as junk is extremely difficult
I remember when it was considered a mark of professionalism for a web developer to have an email on their own domain. At some point that changed. I think after GMail came out it was so good that everybody switched to that.
Ah that’s still totally possible, I do that.
The domain isn’t all that important, the IP address of the mail server is. I pay an external service that provides a mail server, and my DNS records point to that.
But hosting my own mail server, while possible is not recommended.
There’s a difference between advocacy and evangelism.
Things rarely are black and white.
I personally do not think it is conflicting, especially when you consider how hard or impractical it is to completely avoid the non-free/proprietary software. Services like Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook, to name a few, have been around for a long time, and they have become so entrenched in our daily lives and social circles that avoiding them completely and all at once may be too disruptive. I’ve been using Facebook since I was in high school, and that’s also the platform I use to communicate with my closest friends. To suddenly jump away from that and expect my closest friends to follow me to the next major platform (e.g. Mastodon) is going to take a lot of effort and convincing, especially if my friends have people they connect with on Facebook and are not likely to move to another platform.
The same can be said for YouTube, even with their ridiculous anti-adblocker stance. People have become so invested in it that completely breaking away from YouTube would be almost impossible. Thankfully, that’s where services like Piped and PeerTube come into play.
I think what really matters is that people at least make the effort to utilize FOSS whenever and wherever possible. Whether that be a Linux distribution over Windows and Mac, or a FOSS alternative to one of Google’s or Microsoft’s products, or a federated platform like Lemmy and Mastodon, there are so many ways we can demonstrate our love and support for FOSS, and utilizing a non-free/proprietary service does not make us any less committed to FOSS.
Anyways, that’s just my two cents.
This kind of question comes up in many areas. And which software you use is less critical compared to politics. Of course you can use google and advocate foss, if your question is to be taken literally. It would not be the best thing you could do, but what would even be the best thing? Using software is not helping anyone (exept for software that takes your data or mines crypto while you use it or something). You would need to donate, contribute or bring people to do these things to really help the software/devs. Use which software/service you are comfortable with using.
thank you, you’re right, I love open source, I will contribute to it. And by the way, this is an extreme opinion, but Discord is an open source hybrid!! It’s mostly open source but it’s got proprietary blobs.
There are other issues with Discord relating to privacy, which would even with a libre client (I think there is one? Bettercord or fosscord or something?) be a good reason to avoid it.
But I understand that there are important communities on there.
