I wish well-done XMPP/Jabber clients that do voice come up. If you are an XMPP protocol developer / implementer reading this, thank you for what is there so far. Please don't stop.
If you have been watching the news this week about Jeff Bezos.. I don't like that someone can share a message/picture/video on WhatsApp and crack into a phone. There are too many closed source vendor components in an Android phone even if you're using an open source phone OS like Lineage OS, and these may go stale over time or have something vulnerable in them on purpose.
WhatsApp always seems to need a phone. It works in a web browser in an inconvenient manner that still needs the phone to login. It is a centrally controlled system. While Signal is open source, it is also centrally controlled. I prefer and hope Jabber implementations get much better. Spam for Jabber can be managed the way it is managed for email. Some spam would get through, but it does on WhatsApp too.
Email hasn't gone away or lost its place because it's federated (distributed). It works on multiple platforms, and if you don't like a particular way of doing email, there are a lot of choices. Jabber is similar for instant messaging, but it can do with a renaissance. (I use Jabber at work and home, but the clients I use such as Conversations don't have the features and experience that WhatsApp/Telegram do.)
The oldest and most used services are federated - HTTP, email.. and at the start of a communication - DNS.
WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. are very entrenched services. It's not enough that you move from WhatsApp - your family, friends, businesses that you work with, all have to use the new service you are switching to, so you can chat with them on that other service.
It's easier to switch your search engine. :) DuckDuckGo has worked very well for web search for me. I use it about 95% of the time and Google Search the other 5%.
This isn't true for India. Until last year, all the cards I'd seen in India were either Visa, Mastercard or AMEX. This year my bank tried to send me a "Rupay" card which is an Indian processor; on speaking to the bank staff, it appears that the central bank (RBI) are asking banks to promote Rupay by default to avoid transaction data from leaving the country. But it's still possible to change to a Mastercard or Visa card.
Many businesses and individuals would still prefer to have a Mastercard or Visa at this time as most international websites that sell services and goods don't accept Rupay.
This was after I reported that my 72 year old mother was asked to get out of the car by the driver after sitting in it, because he learned of the destination after starting the trip and did not want to take her there. Uber does not show the destination to the driver before starting the trip.
I was probably speaking to a bot, or nobody had the patience to fix the problem.
Wow.. wow.. there are others who have read the same things. :)
The hydro pneumatic rocket!
I tried to find Mir publishers books about 10 years ago. Apparently Mir got bought out and publishing ceased.
Another gem is "Fun with maths and physics" by Ya Perelman. It's available in a cheap reprint now, nothing that matches the original Mir publishers book.
I can give you a link to download my build if you want (which is a pristine unofficial build with Android security patches till February 5, 2019), but in the end, it depends on whether you'll trust a binary build from some random person: https://mukund.org/tmp/lineage-15.1-20190214-UNOFFICIAL-whyr...
It is neither difficult nor very slow to build it from source, but it can do with a fast internet link (~fiber speeds) as the build process initially clones from several git repositories (but later syncs just fetch the changes which is very fast). Unfortunately not everyone has access to fiber.
With fiber, the clone and build ought to complete in about a day depending on your machine's performance. I recommend that you build your own (let the initial build run in the background even if it takes more than a day to finish). If you do it once and use the built OS, you'll not search again.
Same device here (whyred). If you want an "original" build, you can still build an up-to-date Lineage OS with the latest Android security patches from source from their repo. It is very easy to build it on Fedora or Ubuntu and it doesn't take more than a few minutes to do updated builds once you do the first complete build.
(Getting the tree from an existing Lineage OS phone per the build instructions did not work for me.) Note that the latest version of whyred vendor tree for Android Oreo is from last year. I suspect this is because Xiaomi has moved on to Android Pie for whyred.
What all this gets for you is a build with the latest Android security patches applied (February 5, 2019 as of today).
Good luck. I can report that it builds and works well and it is straightforward to build it (more so for a programmer).
Having observed this area for 18 years now, I'll say that gatekeeper (a party which has unwaveringly observed and stuck to delivering the principles of software freedom) is the Free Software Foundation. This is the only reason why users gravitate to "open source" - not its sexy name, but the freedoms such software provides when a user wants to use/apply it.
Back in the day, the founding president of OSI justified VA Linux making the "alexandria" project closed source (the software that ran Sourceforge.net back in the day - back when sourceforge.net was a good citizen). The remains of "alexandria" was forked to form other projects such as GNU savannah, and there was a later fork named GForge IIRC.
There is only one organization that has unwaveringly sought freedoms for users of software. I've firsthand heard it being accused of promoting communism, and sometimes have wondered if it went too far. At least, they haven't wandered in their principles.
On the other comments in this thread, even though MongoDB have "submitted" to having the OSI review their license, OSI still aren't capable of restricting anyone's rights on the use of the phrase "open source" including MongoDB's.
I can see your organization tries to make sure that there is an approved set of principles that identify libre/free software which is good. The phrase "open source" has been used in myriad ways since its early days, and not just for software.
I'm a programmer who has written open source since 2000. I would defend you when it comes to the benefits of libre software, but you can't restrict others over using something that you don't legally own.
I've been a Hetzner customer for several years. I'm yet to have a faulty disk experience with them, but that's not what this post is about.
This month I "purchased" another EX41 server. Something made me wonder if the hard disks on the machine allocated to me were old ones previously used for some other customer, so the first thing I did after installing Linux was to look at smartctl output. Not only were the disks new (power on hours) but as part of provisioning the machine, they seem to have performed a "long" self-test on the disk (see smartctl -t in its manpage). I was impressed by this, because they seem to have checked that I didn't get bad disks on arrival. This is probably expected of such a service provider.. but I've seen worse.
It would take someone with reasonable technical skills to install LineageOS as it involves unlocking the phone's bootloader (depending on the choice of phone hardware), working around any anti-rollback features by flashing, flashing TWRP recovery, and then boot into TWRP and install LineageOS, GApps and Magisk (if you want root). But the OS once installed can be used by all. Take my non-technical cousin for example who looked at what I was doing and bought the same phone and made me put LineageOS on it and now uses it.
It isn't advice or suggestion BTW.. just my experience. :)
Waiting is inconvenient to buyers and to explain it away, Xiaomi provide some silly reasons such as saying they are trying to thwart sideloading of apps and custom ROMs by resellers, that does nefarious things like steal data... it's a silly excuse, and the wait time inconveniences buyers who want to unlock and install custom ROMs.
Edit: I suspect Xiaomi do this to keep you using MIUI as long as possible because they make money from showing ads in various parts of the system, and also sync your data back to their cloud which probably is resold in some derived form to advertisers. In my opinion, MIUI sucks. MIUI vs. LineageOS proved it is the phone OS (software) which influences how much a person likes a phone, rather than the hardware.
They've recently increased the wait time from 2 weeks to 2 months which had buyers complaining loudly on forums. So for their newest device (the Pocophone) they reduced the wait time to about 3 days. But I think the long wait times still exist for other phone models.
The wait time depends on Xiaomi's mood-of-the-day. They keep fluctuating it.
After my Samsung Galaxy S7 phone started having hardware issues, I looked to see if a phone running open source software was available, one that also could run the Android apps I currently use.
I've had sucess with LineageOS 15.1 on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro (codename "whyred"). Unfortunately the phone's LTE bands don't support every country, but it works fine here in India. The phone hardware costs USD 210 and buys a lot of hardware: https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_redmi_note_5_pro-8893.php
The phone comes with Xiaomi's Android fork called MIUI. It comes with the bootloader locked, and Xiaomi makes you wait for about 2 weeks to 2 months to be able to unlock the bootloader to install a different phone OS (called a custom ROM). Until then, one has to either put up with MIUI or leave the phone sitting on a shelf.
Once you unlock the bootloader, you can install LineageOS on it which is fully open source stock Android with some minimal tweaks and extra privacy features. The current version for this phone is 15.1 which is based on Android Oreo. This reminds me of my old Google Nexus 5's phone OS, but it is far more tweakable.
You can build the LineageOS ROM for your phone from source code: https://download.lineageos.org/whyred
If you have been watching the news this week about Jeff Bezos.. I don't like that someone can share a message/picture/video on WhatsApp and crack into a phone. There are too many closed source vendor components in an Android phone even if you're using an open source phone OS like Lineage OS, and these may go stale over time or have something vulnerable in them on purpose.
WhatsApp always seems to need a phone. It works in a web browser in an inconvenient manner that still needs the phone to login. It is a centrally controlled system. While Signal is open source, it is also centrally controlled. I prefer and hope Jabber implementations get much better. Spam for Jabber can be managed the way it is managed for email. Some spam would get through, but it does on WhatsApp too.
Email hasn't gone away or lost its place because it's federated (distributed). It works on multiple platforms, and if you don't like a particular way of doing email, there are a lot of choices. Jabber is similar for instant messaging, but it can do with a renaissance. (I use Jabber at work and home, but the clients I use such as Conversations don't have the features and experience that WhatsApp/Telegram do.)
The oldest and most used services are federated - HTTP, email.. and at the start of a communication - DNS.
WhatsApp, Facebook, etc. are very entrenched services. It's not enough that you move from WhatsApp - your family, friends, businesses that you work with, all have to use the new service you are switching to, so you can chat with them on that other service.
It's easier to switch your search engine. :) DuckDuckGo has worked very well for web search for me. I use it about 95% of the time and Google Search the other 5%.