It’s been called Equal Earth since 2018. The word “equal” here (likely?) refers to the fact it’s an equal-area projection, although it could be politically charged.
Haven’t had that luxury in Russia. Though being a script kiddie I’ve set up a shortcode just for myself (there were these “paid content SMS as a Service” thingies that forwarded SMS text to an HTTP endpoint you provide).
Didn't have that luxury either, but at one point, "Twilio" was the star and poster-child of startups, with their "Guerilla marketing" and completely fresh and new roles of "developer advocates" so of course everyone and their mother had been to at least one Twilio meetup, or your local meetup with a "developer evangelist" from Twilio. Lots of us built our first SMS-capable service as a "Forward this SMS to this HTTP endpoint", I too did the SMS-to-Tweet thing as the US number didn't accept my SMSes (or wasn't available, or something).
.com is probably okay, but like .name, it’s also managed by Verisign. .org is run by a non-profit, PIR, so I’d argue it’s a safer choice (especially since they already got the slap on a wrist for trying to sell it off [1] and likely won’t attempt it again for the time being).
Both of these are in the US jurisdiction. If you’re not prepared to sue in the US if somebody screw you over, the ccTLD route is probably better, and the country you live in is usually a good choice indeed (unless you live in, say, Russia, in which case the government might be the ones doing the screwing-over).
> "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store
Not necessarily. Most apps that require Play Services should work fine even if you’re not logged into Google. You do, however, have to have the “gapps” installed. (Some apps would also actually check whether you’ve installed them from the Google Play store and not, say, Aurora, but from my experience most don’t bother.)
Also, perhaps look into microG? It reimplements the Play Services APIs, but is FOSS and only connects to Google servers when it’s necessary for some functionality (e.g. if you enable push notifications): https://microg.org/
I’m using microG without signing in. Could you tell me a bit about what apps you’re using that you’re having trouble with?
A good way to sidestep all those issues is getting your “everyday” apps from F-Droid :-) I’m only using Aurora Store for things like banking, taxi, or food delivery apps, and those are usually working great. Some banks are more trigger happy (shame on you, Revolut) while others seem to be okay. I really only miss Google Wallet.
> GitHub Sponsors is another way to raise for an open source organization.
Which they do in fact use, with OSC as a fiscal host. Still doesn’t help here though – Google is unhappy with the nature of transaction (donation that is not tax-exempt in the U.S.), not with the platform on which it occurs.
If they instead made the donations go to e.g. the lead developer, it would probably be allowed (“peer-to-peer payments” can’t use Google Play billing, so the app can “lead users to [another] payment method” [1]). Whether this is a good idea is a whole another question.
A majority of the people that have contributed to Android did not contribute with the understanding that Google would monopolize payments in all apps on the app store.
reply