On Wed, 20 Nov 2019 14:10:38 -0500 Raghav wrote: > Therefore, I request the FSDG to be revised, to allow > codes/programs in a free system to obtain source code > containing non-free parts, ONLY for the purpose of de-blobbing
publishing liberation scripts is not a new practice; and not peculiar to guix - multiple FSDG distros currently publish their liberation recipes; and their use necessarily entails acquiring the non-FSDG sources somehow - the only alternative would be to keep all liberation scripts private - so, the revision requested here would have been as relevant when the FSDG was written, years before guix existed - parabola, being derived from arch, has worked that way since its inception; and this was surely known when parabola was endorsed by the FSF, some eight years ago that was not to say that we could not do things differently, if the FSF or the community wants a more stringent treatment - we have discussed this quite a lot within parabola (the hyperbola team has also), and ways in which we could modify the dev tools to publish pre-cleaned source-balls, and the user tools to always download sources from parabola, and never from upstream; but mainly as something of a "nice to have" bonus, TODO someday - our interpretation of the FSDG is that it neither allows nor disallows publishing of liberation scripts, or pristine upstream sources - it simply does not specify either; but that omission was not because the practice was unknown at the time when the FSDG was written the only peculiar difference between the guix liberation procedures and others such as parabola and trisquel, would be that, the "swiss-army-knife" sort of tool used by guix, assists with both the installation of pre-made binary packages and also the downloading of liberation scripts and compilation from source, simply by passing different arguments to the same tool; and that tool is an essential system component - whereas, in order to make use of the parabola and trisquel liberation scripts, one needs to explicitly install separate, non-essential build tools, and to acquire the liberation scripts using some generic tool such as a web browser, git, or wget - im not certain, but i believe that the dragora package manager is more similar to guix in that way - we could discuss whether or not that subtlety is important; but i dont see it as fundamental to the underlying issue, which is whether or not the subject of liberation scripts should be made explicit in the FSDG we can discuss that, one way or another; but i dont think that an amendment would be necessary to permit the publishing of liberation scripts, because i dont think that the FSDG currently prohibits it
