Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 22, 2008, Casey Dahlin <cjdahlin at ncsu.edu> wrote:

> David Smith wrote:
>> Alexandre Oliva wrote:

>> Write a yum plugin that refuses to install packages that have
>> licensing policies you object to.

This is not about the license.  The kernel claims to be under GPLv2,
even though, per our licensing policies and guidelines, it should be
'redistributable', or not even that.

A license doesn't ensure your freedom.  A copyright license mere
states some permissions that, per copyright law, you might require in
order to do certain things that, in the absence of these permissions,
would be substantial limitations to your freedom.

But lack of permissions in a license isn't the only way software can
become non-Free.  Consider software under the modified BSD license,
for example.  Some of it is present in Microsoft Windows, and it's
still under that BSD license.  If you look at all the fine-print,
you'll eventually find the UCB copyright notice and a copy of the
license.  But does that make that piece of software Free Software,
just because it's licensed under a Free Software license?

Obfuscated code pretending to be source may also be under various Free
Software licenses, but still deny users the freedom to study the
source code and adapt the software to their needs, because the
obfuscated source code is incomprehensible and not amenable to
modification.

The licence a package is under isn't everything.  Please don't
conflate these two related but significantly different topics into
one.

>> That sounds much easier to deal with than trying to keep your virtual
>> package up to date with new packages continually being added to the
>> repository.
>> 
>> 
> Better way to do it would be to have license packages. So packages
> could "requires" nonfree, and this would show up in the yum
> reports. Yum remove nonfree would also purge your system effectively.

And then, if you exclude nonfree from the repo, no such package would
be installed.  Yes, this can work beautifully.

The catches I can think of here is that this proposal depends on the
maintainer of the package containing non-Free Software to introduce
the dependency, and, if the non-Free Software is found out after a
build, someone might still get the impression that that particular
build does not contain non-Free Software, while it's widely known that
it does, and someone who rejects nonfree might end up keeping the
non-Free package installed because an update says it would introduce
non-Free Software.

A fedora-freedom package is superior IMHO because (i) it can be
updated so as to mark existing packages as containing non-Free
Software, (ii) it makes the choice positive, (iii) it is easier to
connect it to a feature, (iv) it enables finer-grained control of what
you don't want on your system.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}