I have been following this issue for a long time now, however I haven't been able to respond to any threads due to technical reasons.
As I've been following along with these issues I've found very little evidence that Chromium is in-and-of-itself non-free (not including third-party plugins such as Widevine, which also support DRM), much less other software that use Chromium infrastructure (correct me if that was the incorrect term) such as QtWebEngine. What's more, the evidence that is provided tends to be either of no indication that Chromium is non-free (such as the Debian lintian reports that I constantly see floating around [0]) typically refers to JavaScript files that are Free Software, however they are simply minified. Although this may be a reason not to package it, it most definitely is not a reason to call Chromium non-free. If the arguments were saying that Chromium has non-free third parties such as Widevine then that is perfectly valid (so does Firefox[1], however we do not have the Firefox issue, in Parabola at least, since we use IceWeasel/IceCat instead), but third-party plugins such as Widevine can be easily removed (the Debian community has done this[2]). In the Red Hat community these reports were brought up to their maintainer and the maintainer concluded that all of the issues brought up in the prior mentioned lintian reports are in reality free JS but simply minified (which, as I mentioned before, is an issue for packaging but not for freedom necessarily)[3] The second largest complaint of Chromium has been that it leaks information[4][5]. First I would like to make very clear that even if a program lacks security or privacy features that **does not** make it non-free. Therefore, even if there are privacy issues Chromium should not be labelled as non-free, but rather insecure and at the very most spyware (we are well aware that even Free Software can spy on you[6]). However, moving on, I have looked through these issues that were brought up and it seems that they have been slowly fixed with the exception of three of them which were labelled as either `wontfix'[7][8] or still remain open[9]. Upon these grounds Chromium can be judged. If it turns out that there truly are non-free files in Chromium then let it be so, I won't complain, but there needs to be solid evidence. I understand it being removed from the Parabola repositories as a temporary measure until the issue is resolved (as Parabola should not risk there being non-free software in the repository), however to publicly claim that it is non-free without any substantial evidence is something that has been annoying me. I would ask that when these claims are made that they are given with hard evidence as to the matter, and (quite importantly) that when it is announced to the community via news post[10] that it give **all** evidence (or at least the most pertinent evidence) as to why a software is non-free, and if the reasons are something other then it should be stated as such (eg. privacy concerns, temporary removal until freedom issues resolved, etc.). Again, if Chromium indeed has non-free files then I am fine with it being removed, however I would like links with the evidence **and** it should be reported to upstream as an issue (a link to the upstream bug would also be something nice to add to the news post). I'm pretty sure that opening a bug report will be much less work than all of this repackaging of KDE and Qt packages to work without QtWebEngine (which, as mentioned by Elyzabeth, is probably not even non-free even if Chromium were). [0] https://lintian.debian.org/maintainer/[email protected]#chromium-browser [1] https://support.mozilla.org/t5/Video-audio-and-interactive/Watch-DRM-content-on-Firefox/ta-p/37423 [2] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/chromium-widevine [3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1418917 [4] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2017-01/msg00056.html [5] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ImportantGoogleChromeBugs [6] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.html [7] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=163116 [8] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=80722 [9] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=55058 [10] https://www.parabola.nu/news/chromium-blacklisted-to-respect-your-freedom/ > I earnestly hope this upcoming FSF article provides explicit and irrefutable > proof of QtWebEngine being non-free. Proof of hard-coded connections and > privacy leaks that I can verify for myself. A list of the non-free plugins > and > DRM shipped as a part of Qt because none are listed in the documentation. Any > evidence of such obviously malicious behaviour that I can report to Qt and > work towards fixing. -- Nicolás A. Ortega (Deathsbreed) https://themusicinnoise.net/ http://uk7ewohr7xpjuaca.onion/ Public PGP Key: https://themusicinnoise.net/[email protected]_pub.asc http://uk7ewohr7xpjuaca.onion/[email protected]_pub.asc
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
