Follow-up Comment #4, task #15792 (project administration): I don't know much about the Infostud server software, but it probably falls in one of the two following cases:
1) it is developed by people working for the university and is used solely by the university; in that case it is "private software" according to this article https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html, so it is free software in a trivial sense; 2) it is developed by some third party, like a private company; in that case it might be free or proprietary for the university. But I think it really doesn't matter. My client talks with this server using HTTP requests and JSON responses, which are standard protocols. The server is not a *dependency* of my software, because my software is cabable of running fully without the server; the server's job is to provide answers and some services to the client using some kind of protocol or convention. For the same reason you wouldn't say that a web browser depends on a web server, and by the way there are free web servers and proprietary web servers. You wouldn't say either that the Telegram client depends on proprietary software, even though the only Telegram server available is proprietary. There's also another ethical point: if you enroll at this university, right now you are *forced* to use a proprietary client in order to progress in your academic career, for example to try exams and pay tuitions. My client would try to provide some of these features as a free replacement (while some other features would be really difficult to replace for technical reasons). So it would make a substantial difference for the freedom of many people. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?15792> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.nongnu.org/
