Comment on Proton launches privacy-focused Google Docs alternative: Docs in Proton Drive is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted collaborative document editor

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lastweakness@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

would be good, actually.

Good for us. Bad for business. I explained this in another comment too but Proton’s idea of “open source” is simply to build trust in the security and privacy offered by the service. At least, as much as you can trust any SaaS.

but then why not share the server side code?

And to answer this… Well, business and practicality… One more than the other ofc unfortunately… Why would they take on the additional burden of making it self-hostable, make the backend fully open source, etc just to make competition for themselves? And that maintenance burden is huge btw, especially when the backend was probably never intended for self-hosting in the first place.

If Proton, as a company or foundation, didn’t keep making the right decisions in terms of privacy and security, we might have had a reason to doubt their backend. But so far, there’s been nothing. And steps like turning to a foundation-based model just inspires more trust. By using client-side encryption, even within the browser, they’re trying to eliminate the need for trusting the closed source backend. Open sourcing the backend wouldn’t improve trust in the service itself anyway since you can’t verify that the code running in the backend is the same as the open sourced code. If you’re concerned about data, they also offer exports in open formats for every service they offer.

Why wouldn’t you trust them just because their backend is closed source? Ideologically, yeah I’d like them to open source absolutely everything. But as a service, whose income source is exclusively the service itself, how can it make sense for them to open source the backend when it cannot tangibly benefit their model of trust?

My other comment regarding proton and trust: lemmy.world/comment/11003650

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