IIRC, somebody tried to trace the company back to its owners, but the chain ended with a company that is likely Chinese. One of the earliest company-hosted relay servers was also located in China based on its IP address. The company now runs multiple servers on various continents.

Some people also freaked out when the company started offering paid, binary server images and services that added extra features like a management console, assuming (incorrectly) that they would replace the basic, no-cost, open-source images.

RustDesk. It works like TeamViewer: install the client on both machines, have the relative read out the client ID and one-time password over the phone, and you can connect immediately. It has self-hostable server components, but you can use the public relay servers without having to configure anything on the clients. You don't have to open any ports on the firewall either.

He did try, years ago, to post cynical but inoffensive memes. I'm pretty sure I had to suspend his account at some point. He's also gotten himself banned from political communities for quoting holocaust deniers, using ableist slurs, and generally being a wanker. He's also posted some antisemitic remarks on other communities. The modlog his quite colorful.

Oh shit, madthumbs is back? He's always been a hilarious, but equally pathetic troll. I thought we'd lost him when he got all pissy and locked the community a year ago.

An Expanse reference in the wild? Beratnaaaa!

Volkswagen sausages.

Gimme the GEP gun.

The developers themselves are often not the package maintainers. Before a package is published or updated in one of the official Arch repos, it has to be built, tested, and sometimes patched (which is why you see a -1, -2, etc. appended to the package version), in order to work correctly not just on its own but in an Arch system with Arch packages that it is likely to encounter. The process is not as thorough as Debian for example, but it's still the responsibility of the package maintainer. If the package is still in early development, deprecated (e.g. wine32), an out-of-tree kernel module (e.g. xpadneo-dkms), or is meant to be built from the latest available commit (any number of *-git packages), the AUR is a convenient way to share PKGBUILD files rather than have the user build the software manually based on a readme, if it even includes build instructions. The PKGBUILD is then ingested by makepkg, which both configures the environment and builds the software, and outputs a package that can then be installed and managed by Pacman.

The caveat is that packages built from the AUR are not vetted by any package maintainers. They can have bugs, they might depend on outdated or no-longer-existent packages, or might contain malware.

Good luck getting gamers to boycott anything.

I probably didn't translate that properly. I meant "one of the two bodies involved in lawmaking".