Ezekiel 23:20
Meanwhile Reddit is a doubly poor example because even though the service contains NSFW content, it marks it as such, and then the client not only doesn't itself contain it but gives the user a separate opportunity to select against it when using the app to download pages.
And clearly that wasn’t the standard anyway. Before the introduction of the policy restricting religious texts, the only apps F-Droid had marked NSFW were frontends to porn sites, even though the apps presumably contained no sexual content directly.
Which would also explain the Bible apps without an initial copy. Choosing which translation to download when substantially all of them are translations of the same NSFW text means that substantially all of the users would end up with NSFW content on their device by using the app.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Bible has been around for a while, and translations exist to serve the current sensibilities of every period within that time.
Here's Ezekiel 23:20 in the King James Version:
For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
This has been euphemized so heavily that much of the original meaning is no longer present.
1. They have a policy of marking apps as NSFW if using them has a high probability of loading NSFW content onto the device. We can't easily rule this out. It's a small project so they have to be reserved about compliance issues because they don't have the resources to defend against expensive litigation and they could just be exercising an abundance of caution.
2. They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them. "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."
Which one of these is even objectionable? It seems like you want that if they're doing the second one they should admit to it, but in that case they're just maintaining kayfabe. The trolling is more effective when it's ambiguous. It's obvious that it could be that. If the message is to invite their opponents to go eat sand then it's not being lost in translation. But making that explicit only makes it easier to dismiss them as antagonists, or retaliate against them for being overtly defiant.
Whereas if they play it straight, what is someone going to say? That it shouldn't apply to this, right? Okay, then we need to pin down the rules for how exceptions work. Exceptions that could then be applied to other things. Which is to their advantage to have their opponents doing in this context because then they want the exceptions to be broad and reasonable instead of not caring if someone else is getting screwed by them.
If F-Droid were being cautious:
• They would have restricted social media apps, which a lot of public hysteria targets, which many of the new laws explicitly target, and which other app store providers like Google and Apple have already faced and continue to face massive financial and legal consequences over. If F-Droid is unwilling to take a principled stand against censorship, this would be an obvious step to shield themselves from liability.
• They would not have prioritized blocking apps providing ancient religious texts, since there’s no public hysteria over Bible and Quran apps, none of the new laws explicitly target them, and no app store provider has faced consequence or threat of consequence over providing them.
I’m completely comfortable disbelieving F-Droid was ever actually concerned that religious apps could be a liability risk.
> They're trolling Republicans with malicious compliance. They don't like the laws being enacted, they know the people enacting them like the Bible, so they apply the policy in the way which is maximally adversarial to the opponents imposing it on them.
If the targets of their trolling (and I’m glad you agree, it is trolling) are legislators in backwards U.S. states, they hit far off the mark. The only people impacted by F-Droid’s censorship are its users, who are (for the most part) members of the free software community. What’s the point of a troll that is unnoticed by your enemies and only harms your friends who already agree with you?
> "If you don't like the consequences of your law then feel free to repeal it."
In case you haven’t noticed, these laws are being passed everywhere from the UK to Brazil to Australia to Singapore to the EU. And yes, some U.S. states, too. So your “realpolitik” remark in another comment is similarly pointless, because those other politicians and regulators are also completely unaffected by F-Droid’s actions.
> Which one of these is even objectionable?
In response to a law saying F-Droid must punch some of its users in the face, F-Droid of its own volition decided to punch a different set of users in the face rather than refusing to punch anyone at all. I find that objectionable, and the flurry of comments they received shows others do too. Instead of taking principled actions or practical actions, F-Droid’s maintainers decided to take a swipe at users of religious apps on F-Droid, refused to explain themselves (“kayfabe,” as you called it), then upon receipt of unexpected blowback on their forums and issue trackers, backtracked and reversed the policy without further comment. It was a boneheaded move that drove away some app developers and some users like me. How can I trust them to not make some other boneheaded move in the future? Can you imagine Debian or OpenBSD doing such a thing? Now F-Droid has a big banner up top pointing to https://keepandroidopen.org/ and making themselves (noticeably, not other FOSS app stores) out to be the defenders of app freedom. It’s completely tone‐deaf and shows poor judgment. If current or future F-Droid leadership actually addressed the issue, I might be convinced to use it again. But I won’t hold my breath.
Not only is this not going to convince anyone that there's anything behind it other than an attempt to formulate a winning argument (having set that as your goal) irrespective whether there's any actual sincerity to the words you're choosing, but it's going to come comes across to a healthy portion the world's population as the opposite of clever: that anyone who's convinced themselves that it really is clever and that no one can possibly permeate this forcefield of insincerity is a perhaps-delusional, and definitely-insufferable halfwit.
The original complaint was that if they were doing it to be controversial, why not do the same thing to viewer apps for Reddit or Wikipedia? But those are necessarily distinguishable. If the standard was that a viewer merely could load external NSFW content rather than was likely to, you would have to do web browsers, mail clients, podcast managers, file transfer apps, video players that can open external links -- it'd be most of the repository. And that would be far less defensible, because you can point to specific controversial Bible verses, but how are you going to make the case that generic FTP clients and web browsers are NSFW with a straight face? But conversely, how would you argue that a Reddit viewer is NSFW but a web browser that can open Reddit isn't?
The fork where they need "a sincere belief that these apps contained content unsafe for minors" was the other fork, where they're doing it because of potential liability rather than to make a statement. But that fork was flawed to begin with, because they're not required to think that it actually is unsafe. They could also be concerned that someone else could claim that and then even if the people claiming that are jerks and even if the jerks could ultimately lose, they could prefer to be risk-averse when they don't have the resources to handle things like that.
Which is another reason the Bible should be banned from being accessed by minors. If a child needs an abortion, they should consult a medical professional. They should not read about how to perform an abortion in an app on their phone and attempt to perform the procedure themselves.
Not really. And biblical times does not mean people's lives were run according to commandments in the Jewish bible (neither in ancient Judea nor elsewhere).
Does the Bible encourage violence or promiscuity? Not really, no. Does it mention and describe those things in some detail? Yes, absolutely. If that's the kind of content you need to remove from your store, then obviously you need to remove the Bible from your store. Whether that was really the case seems questionable at best, but the stated logic seemed pretty coherent to me.
If F-Droid were being overcautious, they would have blocked social media apps too. Social media is explicitly the single biggest target of these “think of the children” app store laws after outright porn sites. F-Droid left Reddit and Mastodon clients unmarked. Am I supposed to believe that F-Droid honestly thought the law applied to apps containing only ancient religious texts, and not to social media? Has any other app store interpreted the regulations the same way? And if they truly believed that was a legal requirement, why did they reverse the policy after only a couple days of user complaints?
(As an aside, if they indeed had to follow some Dutch law and remove Bible and Quran apps, maybe F-Droid can be hosted by freedom.gov, US govt's new anticensorship portal..)
Hey I believe that too. If people are entitled to believe whatever is written in those books, surely people are also entitled to believe it's nonsense and actively harmful.