Re: Creating a survey for improving the FSD

[Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2022 09:59:41 -0500
bill-auger <bill-auger@peers.community> wrote:
> in most cases where some proposed program is not fit for the
> FSD, it will simply be forgotten - the information which led to
> the "non-free" conclusion is discarded; and there may be no
> record at all that the software was ever evaluated - there are
> only few rare instances where that information was preserved -
> that information is very useful to distro maintainers though, and
> anyone who would care to try liberating the software - instead
> of retaining the results of the licensing audit _somewhere_, each
> distro must repeat the same audit, when users request the
> software to be packaged - so that was the motivation to merge
> the parabola blacklist data (somehow) into the FSD - it was
> actually the original motivation for the parabola blacklist -
> the parabola devs treated it as a supplement to the (now
> unmaintained) FSDG blacklist (which did at one time preserve the
> hard-earned knowledge about the licensing deficiencies of certain
> popular programs 
> 
> at that time, it occurred to me that the actual work involved
> with maintaining the FSD overlaps greatly with the FSDG - there
> is much redundant effort; yet zero cooperation among the teams -
> we should expect that the FSD and FSDG would agree that each
> program either _is_ or _is_not_ free software; but there are
> examples where the FSD and FSDG disagree on that most
> fundamental factor which binds them - 'nmap' for example, is
> non-free according to the FSD; but FSDG are permitted to
> distribute it - it is rather incredulous to see the FSD and FSDG
> in disagreement on that essential question for any example
> 
> so my suggestion is to merge the FSD and FSDG work-groups - a
> single work-group and a single mailing list, on which to ask and
> deliberate upon all such questions like "is _this_program_ libre
> or not?"
That would indeed simplify things a lot. It would also mean that users
would be able to just read the FSDG and understand what is OK and what
is not OK in the FSD.

And like "common distros" we'd also have some idea of what is
problematic in programs.

On my side I've started to document external repositories and the
programs that use them in the ExternalRepositories page on the
Libreplanet wiki[1], because it's a cross distribution resource and
that anyone can create an account and contribute.

Though I'm not sure if it's the right location for that. More precisely
I'm wondering if things should be moved to the FSD once a given
repository/program has enough detail to make sure that it is or that
it's not FSDG compliant.

The next question would also be if it's possible to retrieve data from
the FSD in the Libreplanet wiki.

References:
-----------
[1]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Software/research/ExternalRepositories

Denis.

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