[kde] [Bug 492526] New: Nate should not unilaterally decide on KDE's policy in regards to advertisement/spamming unsuspecting users of KDE.

[bugzilla_noreply at kde.org]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492526

            Bug ID: 492526
           Summary: Nate should not unilaterally decide on KDE's policy in
                    regards to advertisement/spamming unsuspecting users
                    of KDE.
    Classification: I don't know
           Product: kde
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
                OS: Linux
            Status: REPORTED
          Severity: minor
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
          Assignee: unassigned-bugs at kde.org
          Reporter: shevy at inbox.lt
  Target Milestone: ---

Quite recently Nate announced on his blog the rationale of misusing KDE's
notification system for including
unwanted messages.

The blog entry can be found here, for those unaware of it:

https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/

This was tied to a discussion on reddit, where critical fols were further
subsequently banned, enforced
by moderators which are ... KDE devs - hence, incurring a huge bias in favour
of misusing the KDE
notification system through censorship. After all Nate heavily advertised for
his blog entry on
reddit and tried to defend it with very poor "arguments", which were quickly
rebuked, before folks 
got banned for disagreeing with Nate there.

There are several reasons as to why KDE devs should not abuse KDE users via a
notification system ever -
not only in regards to this "harmless" notification, but more generally so.
Trust is earned, not granted
or given. How can the user trust KDE devs who subject them to unwanted content?

As we mentioned the issue of trust, let's continue with this from a mostly
philosophical consideration.

If the users can no longer trust KDE devs - or, a few KDE devs - to not misuse
something like a notification
system that should yield CRITICAL INFORMATION about the software (or hardware),
as-is, what about other
possible breaches of trust in comparison? If KDE devs can now willy-nilly send
ads through notification
systems, why not misuse the data from telemetry, for instance? Perhaps someone
out there may want to pay
for the data, in order to snatch some data of commonly used hardware or
hardware settings among the user
base of KDE. While isolated data may not be too overly useful, there are
numerous case studies where
private interests tied together information. Facebook is one such example; see
the problem of Facebook
spying on the people and tying information even from non-online sources,
turning it into one big
CIA-book (even if it may not derive from a state actor; the comparison is not
necessarily tied to 
a state agency, but to the habit of spying in general).

The issue of trust is also tied to ethics in some way. How can you recruit new
KDE devs if they suddenly
become renowned for sending unwanted messages to KDE users? Not everyone wants
to become famous for
this. Developers often make choices not only or solely for money (evidently)
but also whether they can
associate themselves with a certain project or not. This is another reason that
very clearly should
speak against sending unwanted messages to KDE users. It does not seem to be
ethical to do so, despite
the counter-"arguments" given as to why it is mandatory for KDE now to harass
its users. One "argument"
brought forward on reddit was that Thunderbird did so as well and it generated
a LOT of revenue for
Thunderbird, sustaining its funding. This is exactly the same argument
advertisers use: they get
more money through ads. Hence why people must see ads. See Google's recent
Manifest 3 and its war against
ublock origin. Or the prior "acceptable ads" campaign to try to sell that
opinion to people - which
has quite clearly failed. I do not think it is a good way to repeat one's
opinion solely in an echo
chamber, which Nate clearly has fallen into now if one reads his comments on
reddit as well as on
his personal blog. Also, it is very questionable to assume his blog should
become the de-facto opinion
representing all of KDE, but that is a separate problem. The problem is NOT
about having an opinion
per se and presenting this on a blog; the problem is how this suddenly becomes
tied to thinking "we
god-like KDE devs can send whatever we want to, to the powerless users of KDE".

Another issue in regards to the situation KDE now faces is the very notion that
Nate represents here the
thought that an agenda (any agenda) should be tied to software code (in KDE),
such as the attempt to pull
money from people when it comes to free, open source software: aka "pay up, in
order to use". (Note that
there were licence controversies in the past surrounding KDE:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE_Projects#Licensing )

Currently it is unclear which KDE dev other than Nate is pushing for this
agenda of misappropriating the 
notification system in Plasma (probably onward, past KDE Plasma 6.2), but it
may be that there is a whole group of
KDE devs who think that users must now pay all of a sudden - which is clearly a
policy/agenda situation, since it
is tied to "we can now abuse the notification system to harass users with those
pay-to-use pop-up messages".

One can reason that a once-per-year message is not problematic, but again the
problem here is that (some) KDE devs who
WANT to show this are deciding - and subsequently dictating - this policy onto
KDE users who may object to this behaviour.

Just as we have ublock origin (as long as it still works) to block unwanted
content in general, or spam-filters against
regular email spam, we are now suddenly required to have KDE software block
unwanted spam within KDE applications, 
solely because one, or a few, KDE devs decided this is now the way to go
forward. 

By the same token of "logic" that is represented here, as can be seen on Nate's
extremely biased blog entry (which is external,
rather than KDE applications that send such unwanted notifications, as that is
internal to the software itself, so this is
different), you could easily scale up the noise level of the spam message at
any moment in time. Why not twelve times per year?
Why not once per day? Why even allow users to ever disable the notification?
After all, the more you pester, excuse me,
"inform" people about how they can give those people who misuse the
notification system more money that way - like some
highway robbers - the more money you can get. So, scale it up; and remove any
way to disable this.

The "reasoning" given by KDE is totally arbitrary, done by an addiction towards
money and falls under the same basic problem:
abuse of the user, provided the user does not want to ever see ads like this.

Having to disable it still requires time investment by the user that KDE now
subjects them into - time that KDE devs assume
the user will easily invest without any problem. Well - what gave KDE the right
to decide this onto the user? Can you show
the signed contract that KDE users gave to KDE to be abused like this, assuming
they do NOT want to see such ads?

One example brought as to "we can easily do so" is Microsoft's policy of
harassing users. I believe KDE should learn from
the best, not from the worst, so these examples of Microsoft abusing the users
is really bad and should not become a role
model for KDE devs. Ever.

Also note that currently I am unaware over as to whether GNOME and GNOME devs
subject people through ads or "informative
messages" in their software stack. Does anyone know whether GNOME3 requests
money after 14 days once installed?

It has also been said that Linux distribution can easily disable/remove the
code (and, of course, anyone modifying the
software as-is, since it is still open source - which shows the power of
disabling this unwanted message altogether
anyway) and thus not subject their users through this issue. Well - why are
only Linux distributions given that easy
choice here? Why do KDE devs favour linux distributions over the general
public? Why don't you let the user decide upon
this beforehand (although the issue of time investment still applies, of
course)? Considering the fact that this violates
e. g. debian's policy (see prior case studies), it was very clear from the
get-go why those who pushed for this
anti-feature went that way: you already knew that this unwanted spam won't be
sustainable. No distribution wants
to advertise for KDE-plasma-spam suddenly. (Not that they would have needed
this, anyway, since they could just
patch the spam out, via patch/diff. Still: why do you guys force linux
distribution maintainers to get rid of 
agenda runs such as abusing the notification system?)

Open Software projects increasingly become opinionated - this is a trend that
can be seen since some years already.

You can see that with the recent ban (although I think it was "just" a
temporary ban) of a python developer who got
critisized by the major python committee for whatever - without a judge making
a ruling so, other than, of course,
the committee itself. It is thus also logical to assume that KDE devs, like
colourful parrots in a dark echo chamber,
will vehemently keep on arguing how unwanted messages are absolutely necessary.
After all, without more money, KDE
will soon die. And we can't have that happen, right? Hence why it is now
ethical as well as necessary for KDE to
solicit more money, no matter which boundaries are crossed.

Due to those mentioned problems, as well as additional (smaller)
considerations, I urge the KDE devs to stop pursing
this (most likely unilateral) agenda-path that Nate here has tried to pioneer,
and which is repeated on the echo-chamber
that has become of reddit. This is, by the way, also not something that is
entirely new, as other KDE devs "reasoned"
before that non-systemd Linux users have no place in KDE - which is another
agenda that is coming about here. I
leave it open which other KDE devs wrote this on his blog, but we are beginning
to find more and more hugely
opinionated, agenda-addicted KDE devs. The more the merrier in the echo
chamber.

At this point in time it is no longer clear whether GNOME is still more
opinionated than KDE. It seems as if
the bigger a project becomes, the more agenda-bound it becomes. I haven't seen
such problems in e. g. XFCE,
mate-desktop or the smaller WMs yet, and with the lightning speed of pushing
more and more agenda into KDE,
as pioneered by a few opinionated KDE devs, KDE may soon be the top-agenda
driven open source project.

I for one am very curious to see the next agenda that is driven forward by some
KDE dev blogging about next.

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