several people have asked about this since 'jami-gnome' was removed from arch - this post is for the sake of a shared "TLDR" reference
the chromium web browser is on the "List of software that does not respect the Free System Distribution Guidelines" wiki page[1] - the presence of any software on that list, prevents any distro from being endorsed by the FSF, if it distributes any of the software on that list, without applying an accepted liberation procedure; and puts the ongoing endorsement in jeopardy for any distro which later accepts any of them un-treated - currently, the only accepted liberation procedure for chromuim is: "use icecat" as far as i have been able to determine, this issue affects all web browsers derived from chromium, simply because no one from any of the popular forks i have looked at (such as ungoogled-chromium and iridium) has claimed to address any licensing issues (those projects address only privacy issues) - also, this issue most likely affects all software which includes, or is derived from chromium, qt-webengine, or electron the suspicions surrounding the chromium browser began (AFAICT), within the first week of the release of the *nix port, back in 2009 - the original discussion on the gnu-linux-libre list spanned over two months[2] and was discussed again on several occasions over the years[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]; and a stack of issues has accumulated on the parabola bug tracker[10] from 2009 through to 2012 there was much activity by the chromium team to address these concerns[11]; and then activity petered out - the issue was never officially closed, however the most important factor, which will determine the likelihood of this controversy ever being resolved, is whether the focus is placed on chromium, qt5-webengine, or electron - chromium is an absurdly enormous code-base; and there are not enough people who are willing to do that work - some have tried[12]; but it is probably never going to be completed satisfactorily - electron seems to a hopeless cause for distros[8]; so the only reasonable project to consider, is qt5-webengine - that is fortunate, because qt5-webengine is used by hundreds of programs, making it the one of the three with the greatest impact on distros, by far - to focus on chromium would require orders of magnitude more work, only for that one extra program finally though, even after a satisfying licensing audit of webengine is completed, the code-base would still need to be reconciled with the "ungoogled" treatments, to address any remaining privacy concerns the most recent discussion is a post to the FSDG mailing list[13] from Andreas Grapentin (a parabola team member), who has volunteered to coordinate the effort, once there are some volunteers [1]: https://www.libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#chromium-browser [2] "Status of google chrome and chromium" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2009-12/msg00000.html [3]: "chromium not free?" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2011-10/msg00000.html [4]: "Time to recheck Chromium?" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2012-03/msg00028.html [5]: "QTWebengine is nonfree" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2017-01/msg00000.html [6]: "QTWebengine is nonfree" https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2017-January/004673.html [7]: "FSF opinion on chromium, QtWebEngine, electron" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-11/msg00003.html [8]: "FSF opinion on chromium, QtWebEngine, electron" https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/directory-discuss/2017-12/msg00008.html [9]: "DSFG in perpetuity" https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2018-04/msg00000.html [10]: "QTWebgine embeds "entire Chromium platform"" https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1167 [11]: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=28291 [12]: the FSD review of chromium https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Review:Chromium-REV-ID-1 [13]: "I am starting a review into whether QtWebEngine is free software" https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2019-04/msg00000.html _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev
