opinion

F-Droid is an app store for Android where only open source applications are available for free. It provides an alternative to the proprietary Google Play Store, which is where most Android app distribution currently takes place. Because the Google Play Store is where most users go to find and install apps, this gives Google the power to exercise control over Android app developers. In this blog post, I describe the design, mechanism and results of this control from the perspective of a long-time Android app developer.

The Apache Software Foundation offers a suite of office productivity software named Apache Open Office. Based on the download page, you would never guess the last major release of the software was made available in 2014. With that bit of release history in mind, would it be fair to consider Apache Open Office as an un-maintained project? In this blog post, I share a quick recap of the history behind Apache Open Office, and my opinion on why The Apache Software Foundation’s actions may be masking the answer to this question.