Hot take coming in. I think there is not such an importance of something being open source at all in privacy space.
Dont get me wrong. Open source is a great good which I deeply support and many in privacy space do. I guess we are often the same kind of people caring for these things. Many offerings in the privacy world are also in some way open source which is the reason for these discussions and on my opinion confusion on the importance.
The discussion here is mostly held by people who have some strong opinions about open source definitions, but I would argue thet the actual impact for a user and reader of our website is pretty much negligible.
We should not be limiting ourselves to projects that are open source at all. In fact we already don’t in several of our recommendations. As I indicated before open source is a great thing, but this discussion is missing out how relevant this all actually is to what level of privacy you get. I see a lot of posts here but none seem to be experts on the legalities of the meaning, making the discussion about the definition to me a bit pointless and overrated.
Open source may be a good way of gaining trust when big user groups are there and many contributors are involved. With smaller projects it simply can’t provide guarantees about privacy and future of existence (I observed that these are the factors of importance here).
I would not recommend some flaky open source app from small project or business over a robust proprietary app that arguably adequately deals with our personal data. Thus it seems to me that the requirement for being open source should be lifted entirely.
We should strive for the best recommendations in privacy and those can be assessed by various other factors. I frankly don’t believe open source to be one. I am confident that many of them will to some extend of definitions be open source too. We however remain a privacy advocacy club, not one for open source, regardless of how much we sympathize with them.