On Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:36:19 -0400 Megver83 wrote: > I opened an issue in ungoogled-chromium's GitHub, asking if it > completely cleans Chromium from non-free software. It > certainly doesn't, but I got very interesting and useful info. > For further reading: > > https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1054
i am cross-posting this to the FSDG mailing list, to make others aware of it the important factor to bear in mind, is that this is not only about establishing a libre-fork - the initial audit needed to do so, would itself be a huge amount of work; but even if that were easy, the main task entails that someone is going to maintain the fork into the future - that would entail constantly watching the new upstream changes, and removing anything new that creeps in, which conflicts with the FSDG - that maintenance is a significant challenge with firefox, which is just barely being met by the available people now - one needs to look no farther than the under-staffed gnuzilla project for evidence of that - most people have the opinion that firefox is significantly more libre-friendly than chromium; which means that there is no one available to do that same amount of work (and probably more) for chromium, not even the initial audit needed to establish the fork if the 'ungoogled-chromium' project had any interest in taking up that challenge, they probably would have done so already - i just read that ticket on github today - i presumed that megver was "barking up the wrong tree"; and that discussion confirmed so - the maintainer made it clear that a full audit would be too much work, and the outcome would be undesirable to that project anyways; because anything which had to be removed, would probably exclude some use-case on some platform, android especially although the reception of megver's proposal was superficially positive, the counter-proposal offered, is to put all liberation changes in a separate and unsupported 'contrib' repo, along with any arbitrary additions which users want to contribute, with little or no over-sight - that does not sound like endorsable software to me; because by the maintainer's own statement, that fork will not be properly maintained and may contain _anything_ that any user submits that brings the endeavor right back to square #1 - the only notable difference with that 'ungoogled-chromium' proposal, is that the fork or patches would be hosted on github under the 'ungoogled-chromium' name-space; but the 'ungoogled-chromium' maintainer was not apparently interested in participating in the effort - for these reasons, the fork or patches would be better hosted by GNU, and dedicated only to FSDG-fitness; but the progress to date is probably 10,000 work-hours away from establishing an initial 100% verified fork - so progress toward the goal of a 100% libre chromium, has unfortunately not been advanced one iota by the attempt - that is also ignoring that the suspected problems, if they exist, are licensing issues, which can most likely only be resolved and attested to by the copyright holders, not by any fork or cleaning scripts such as 'ungoogled-chromium' to quote megver from that ticket: "the Chromium distributed by Guix is completely free, ... ... but it's technically not FSDG compliant because it downloads the chromium source code" if that were the case, then why bother the 'ungoogled-chromium' maintainer with this? - other distros could simply convert the guix liberation script into their format, and declare the matter as resolved, as the guix maintainers suggested 18 months ago - in doing so, however, it would immediately become evident that those liberation scripts would also need to download the upstream sources - that is an entirely different issue though; which was discussed on the FSDG mailing list last november[1] the implications of that, reach far beyond any one program - if the FSDG prohibited liberation scripts from downloading the original source code, then FSDG distros could not publish any liberation scripts - that includes all PKGBUILDs in libre, as well as the gnuzilla makeicecat.sh script - naturally, any liberation script must acquire the original code, which is to be cleaned - the only alternative would be for FSDG distros to clean the sources privately, and publish the pre-cleaned sources publicly, keeping all liberation scripts private, including makeicecat.sh, as published by a GNU project - it would be very ironic if gnuzilla were considered to be unfit for the FSDG to assume that the guix chromium is completely free of licensing problems, is the same as assuming that a forest is completely devoid of ants, merely because none have been seen yet - the larger that forest is, it is increasingly likely to have ants lurking somewhere; and chromium is a very large forest indeed, perhaps the largest on the planet, and mostly unexplored there is one other thing wrong with that statement - the fact that in some or all cases, the upstream code-base may be downloaded to the local computer to be cleaned in place, is not the reason why the guix chromium is unfit for the FSDG - the guix and pureos chromiums are not FSDG-fit, if only because the standing consensus of the FSDG work-group is that they are not - the FSF has never contested nor confirmed that consensus; and the official FSDG recommendation for chromium is still "use icecat" any solution would need to be approved by the FSDG work-group and/or the FSF, before it would be considered to be acceptable in any FSF-endorsed distro, and to become the standard recommendation - the guix chromium has not passed that review; and the pureos chromium has not even been looked at - that is the main reason why this discussion is best conducted on the FSDG mailing list [1]: https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2019-11/msg00002.html
