Tags ("Open Source", "Self-Hostable" etc.)

Phil

We just implemented tags that can be added to entries in the database.

Currently there are the following tags:
Green

EU (for companies registered in the EU)
Open Source
Self-Hostable
Decentralized

Red

Non-European Parent

We would like to extend these, so if you have any suggestions feel free to add to the discussion. :)

Reformer

There are still a few companies missing the "Non-European Parent" tag it seems. Here are a few I immediately recognized:

Volvo
Polestar

These have a parent company headquartered both in Europe and the US but founded in the US, so a bit more nuanced:

Avast
AVG
Avira

Also, there are some missing "Open Source" tags:

Filen
Murena
Proton Drive
Tuta Calendar
Proton Calendar

This is by no way exhaustive, however since there is no easy way to look at all entries, this is very cumbersome to do by browsing categories. That could definitely be improved and ideally the DB would be open sourced so it would be easier for people to contribute and reduce the maintenance burden as there would be no duplicated requests etc. That is however a completely different discussion, I take it.

Phil

Great feedback, thank you for that!

The thing is that we want to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute. The idea of a Git repo came up but that would make it way more complicated for the average Joe to contribute. Therefore we went with the "form on the website" way. Right now, as we have a lot of people suggesting content from Reddit and Lemmy, we have lots of IT/Tech content. In the future we hope to attract more and more non-techies to extend the database in that direction as well.

Hope that makes sense.

That being sad, duplicate suggestions happen (not as much as one would probably think) but once we have a more complete data set, it will probably slow down too - so I guess it's not that big of a problem. There is also the "Report erroneous" data on the entry pages (after clicking on the name of an entry). This is a great way to send in correction for specific entries.

When it comes to your suggestions itself: To me it looks like all five have Non-European parent companies, so the tag was added for all of them. The antivirus products all seem to now be under "Gen Digital". The "open source" part is a bit more tricky as one can debate whether "open source client softtware" is sufficient or if the whole product (including the server side) should be open source for it to be counted as "open source". Right now you have to trust the server side while being ensured that the client encrypts the data. This is a step in the right direction but not completely open source. Right now we only set it for completely open source, meaning both client and server side. This is why based on your suggestion we added the tag obviously missing for Murena.

Thanks again for joining this small community and giving valuable feedback. It is appreciated!

Reformer

Phil

Thank you for coming back to me!

The thing is that we want to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute. The idea of a Git repo came up but that would make it way more complicated for the average Joe to contribute. Therefore we went with the "form on the website" way. Right now, as we have a lot of people suggesting content from Reddit and Lemmy, we have lots of IT/Tech content. In the future we hope to attract more and more non-techies to extend the database in that direction as well.

I totally agree with that sentiment. I wouldn't want to get rid of the submit suggestion button, for sure! It's just that the current system lacks a lot of transparency, IMHO. I have no way to track my suggestions and thus no way of knowing why it wasn't (yet) included without checking over and over again etc. I was thinking the current system could just use an automated system to open an issue on a Git repo, just like some apps do. That way, you'd get the best of both worlds. https://github.com/streetwriters/notesnook has one such system I could think of, as you can see their bot opens an issue if you report a bug inside the application.

There is also the "Report erroneous" data on the entry pages (after clicking on the name of an entry). This is a great way to send in correction for specific entries.

Thanks for that, I totally missed that somehow. I'll make sure to use that one in the future if there is any issue I see.

Right now you have to trust the server side while being ensured that the client encrypts the data. This is a step in the right direction but not completely open source. Right now we only set it for completely open source, meaning both client and server side.

This makes total sense, I maintain a list of open source software myself, so I understand the trickiness that comes with some of these looser terms. Thank you for your consideration though :)

Phil

Reformer Appreciate the feedback and clarification.

For now we will stick with the system at hand because we focus on a lot of things currently (technically improving/extending the database, adding more content and social media/outreach). Having a tracking system for suggestions would probably be "nice to have" but is currently not on the top of our task list unfortunately.

Once we have more fundamentals done, we will make sure to consider a tracking system.