We all saw in the news that Simple Mobile Tools got acquired by ZipoApps and they started filling up the free apps with ads.
Luckily, being those apps open source, a new fork has been created.
It’s called Fossify. They forked all the apps on GitHub and they have a new maintainer.
Now we just need to wait for their first official release and then… we need to spread the word and make people switch from the old SMT apps to Fossify!
Will the old apps get removed on Fdroid? Who decides that?
The new owners OR f-droid, depending on whether they want to start adding badware or close-sourcing it.
They’re GPL’ed, so I’d like to see them try.
GPL only dictates that source is released to those who install the binary
Correct. Meaning it can’t be turned proprietary because if they distribute copies, they must distribute the source code to everyone who gets them, under the GPL.
That’s an interesting question. For now, the apps on F-Droid are still safe, but we have to see.
The new owner could decide to pull them out of the store.
I don’t think the new owners can just pull it from F-Droid, I hope the F-Droid team has a code backup. I think they will migrate everything to fossify. With the gallery this already happened, the SMT Gallery vanished from my phone and the fossify gallery appeared. I guess that’s a good way to go, since for now fossify is just the same thing with a different name.