beyond

Well it wouldn't be free software, because the requirement to publish source code publicly is at odds with the free software definition; the freedom to do something is not an obligation to do it. Copyleft simply means that if you choose to distribute the software, that you must do so under the terms you received it.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#Watcom

But, suppose the free software definition was written with this requirement in mind - as other commenters said it would be untenable, and potentially hazardous if you are using the software in a hostile environment.

HAL 9000 has entered the chat

Note that "source available on github" doesn't necessarily mean it's free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.

That said I believe Stremio's repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it's GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.

This

I've been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don't think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don't care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it's usable again.

Like any company offering "exclusive deals only in the app" the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That's one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the "deal."

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn't stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don't like Midjourney as it's a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It's probably worth noting that Disney didn't actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or "bypass" onerous things like the "integrity API" is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.

We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

This doesn't even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier's symbol, then Kier's symbol absolutely is "actually necessary."

You can see what Fennec removes or patches out compared to upstream Firefox:

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/fenix-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/gecko-liberate.patch

https://gitlab.com/relan/fennecbuild/-/blob/master/prebuild.sh?ref_type=heads

It should be noted, some so-called tracker detectors will find false positives for various proprietary libraries that are "stubbed out" - that is, the interfaces are still there but they have been replaced with empty functions that do nothing.

According to the tracking antifeature on Fennec, it "Connects to various Mozilla services that can track users." SkewedZeppelin (former Mull maintainer) lists some of these in this post. I should be clear that none of these are "trackers" but they are unsolicited connections to Mozilla services that could be used to track users.

I don't know about Ironfox, as far as I know Mull was based on Fennec F-Droid and Ironfox claims to be a continuation of that project, but I can't tell how close Ironfox is to Fennec nowadays.

It absolutely is. WSL literally runs Linux in a virtual machine.