That is a good idea just so that you don’t have to think about any potential privacy issues. Your email could be {firstword}{secondword}{4 numbers} and so long as the words and numbers are randomly generated, you can avoid accidentally including personal references or biases.

Your username does not need to be high-entropy, though. It will be semi-public. So it’s not about strength against dictionary attack or similar, it is just about leaving the selection process up to a random process that isn’t witnessed by a third party. You can write scripts that will generate these kinds of things using Python and the faker library.

I think it is unlikely that they are simply bad at PR and not trying to do damage control for something they would like to push anyways eventually. Why are they creating a proprietary element in the first place? Is the selling point of their product not that it is open source? They are making some changes.

…or they made an honest mistake and don’t care to put it back on F-droid for reasons to which we are not privy.

An honest mistake of hosting their entire own repo and writing up documents for it? It isn’t just off F-Droid, they are doing their own thing.

I bring up these counter-examples not as a way to point out where I’m right and you’re wrong, but to point out that there are other candidate explanations, and it’s not justified to infer that malfeasance is the only likely possibility.

Yes you are suggesting that people give them the benefit of the doubt. And I am saying that would be unreasonable given the facts.

I also understand why you would cynically think that Bitwarden might succumb to Capitalism—I too live in a late-stage-capitalism country—but that’s not a forgone conclusion, and I say again that we don’t need to be imagining villains when there’s plenty of objectively real ones at which to point a finger alreadIy

Bitwarden has already succumbed to capitalism, it is a product by and for a for-profit company. It is, with few exceptions, just a question of when they will have a profitability crisis and need to find avenues by which to increase revenues or decrease costs. Sometimes that takes 15-20 years, sometimes it takes 3.

I have not followed their finances but I would be curious to know what they are doing at the moment. Could be seeking to get bought out, could be looking for new funding, could be working around the needs of a major client, could be something else.

As always, when a project is backed by a company we should approach it tentatively because while they will provide support for it for some time they will eventually be tempted to do something shady to increase profit. Or to just be profitable at all, which investors always want ASAP when interest rates are high. And then we will need to fork it and see if it is feasible without VC backing. To my knowledge the only other viable path for an open source company is to become an industry standard where the major monopolies decide to not fight about it and instead say, “it is fine as it is and won’t be profitable but it is a useful thing to share costs on”. Docker, Inc. is somewhere along that path, scraping together products at the periphery of the software while the industry monopolies more or less share the core project in its various compatible forms. And Docker similarly tried to ham-fistedly seek profit sources like when it tried a silly fee scheme for Dockerhub and created a small exodus that the monopolies ate up (e.g. GitHub).

Of course you inherently cannot trust a private company to keep their product open, including open core models. In that situation everyone using or contributing should be making a gamble: that if they go too far the project will be forked, the company will cut its community in two, and the fotk will go on to be decently successful as a community project.

Their inability to do the right PR things is just a signal that they can’t be bothered with the facade that is useful for them to maintain community support and FOSS nerd marketing for their product.

Re: ethics, they are no longer on F-Droid because they tried to get this in under the radar and include non-free code in builds. Instead of fixing that problem they made their own repo.

Bitwarden will likely eventually destroy their FOSS model for profit-seeking, it is just a matter of when. This is how these things work.

Not trusting a company that has been quietly undermining open source builds of their android client and being cagey + using guarded and laconic PR speak on this is not fallacious thinking, it is just recognizing behaviors and knowing why a company would be doing that. These companies hire people to craft responses and otherwise manage their “community”, and providing no assurances of permanently open clients when they tried to pull this is an intentional omission.

Western Europe has committed to making itself an American dependency. This same thing would eventually repeat there but with different aesthetics.

This kind of thing is the inevitable outcome of US policy to “decouple”, which they are pushing. Take something they nominally control, kick out every designated enemy / enemy collaborator, and then watch as an alternative pops up among the " enemy" and ban its purchase or use.

The projects that have those codes of conduct are the ones where any reactionary maintainers could be overruled. You have to look to the projects that have never had codes of conduct, the old guard and Incelie techbro spaces. Brave’s CEO is a homophobe, for example. This has been known for years, he still makes homophobic comments. Brave does not have a code of conduct or community guidelines. And basically anyone that notices and tries to address an issue like racism or transphobia with a repo suddenly finds a mass of reactionaries coming out of the woodwork.

Not at all true. If you’re referencing US ideologies of Capitalism, holy shit are you wrong and read the wrong Wikipedia.

I am quite correct, though I am referring to liberalism in the general internationa sense. This is what liberalism always has been. You must understand it as what it is and has done, not what it tells you it is meant to be. As Stafford Beer said, it makes no sense to think that the purpose of something is what it consistently fails to do. The liberalism of the enlightenment had in its right hand brutal, racist colonial exploitation and in its left a ruthless industrial revolution chaining the people to factories and removing them from all commond and property. It is a product of capitalism itself.

In fact, the Democrats since the 60’s have run campaigns WAY against the threat of late-stage Capitalism.

The Democrats are a capitalist party and always have been. They do not work against capitalism at all, they support it and protect it. There is really such thing as late-stage capitalism, it is just capitalism developing over time, retaining most of its qualities but taking on new angles. Buy if it does mean anything, it means neoliberalism wrought by financialization, and that is Democrats’ main political base. It’s their main thing, especially as an export.

Republicans are the pro-capitalist party in the sense they want to privatize everything and help their friends

Democrats also do this they just tell you it is efficiency and “public-private partnerships” and “a generous endowment to a public institution” (that they can now defund). The charter school movement is largely Democrats, for example. They simply have different factions on their chopping block, different groups to pander to.

These are anti-capitalist ideas.

What ideas are anti-capitalist? I didn’t see any.

Come on back with some more Wiki links, good buddy.

No thanks. Read the political philosophers of the enlightenment, colonialism, industrialization and proletarianizatikn, the liberal revolutions in Europe, and who emerged to identify themselves as anti-liberal once those revolutions established their ideologies as mainstream, namely monarchists, fascists, socialists, and anarchists. You cannot gain a political education through Wikipedia, it is a Cliffs Notes approach to social topics often written by often incorrect or heavily propagandized (or propagandist!) People, including literal Nazi apologists.

It means supporters of the dominant ideology if capitalism, just like it has always meant.

Liberals when an opportunity to get away with collective punishment arises:

Scratched liberals abound. It takes very liyyl3 for them to be racist and chauvinist.

See: the FOSS higs that all flipped out when contributor agreements with codes of conduct like “don’t be homophobic or racist” started popping up.

It was quite a struggle and there is still a large old guard that simply refuses to move on it.

FOSS has always been political. And usually fairly reactionary.

Ah, I see. Well I’m glad it worked!

Audio configuration sounds like a shell task. Why does it need Python? Is this script in any way an official part of the OS?