* bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> [2019-11-26 22:42]: > 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
Liberation scripts shall be free software, yet those should be published as special package for distribution maintainers or duplicators, within the distribution itself. For users, users should not need to run liberation scripts when getting distribution. They shall get the full free software without the process of liberation. In general, if distribution is called distribution, its method of pulling software should not pull anything non-free to users computers. Otherwise it is not distribution, per se. It is system of preparing software on the computer, but is not distribution. Distribution should have capacity to be duplicated, for example by duplicating the DVD and giving the DVD to other person. It should have capacity to be copied so that it can be shared. If any scripts are involved there to prepare packages, it is not distribution, and it impairs the capacity to share software, which is the point of "distributing". Look at the GNU Linux-libre kernel, it has been deblobbed, liberation scripts exists, but it is distributed as free software. Users can get only free software. Distribution shall offer final product, free software, and not tools to make the final product. That is unfinished work if users would ever need to run liberation scripts to get to the free software. While intention may not be to stear users to non-free software, that is exactly where users are pointed to, to see that non-free software exists, thus such scripts shall be run only by maintainers and not by users. Jean
