Re: Any interest in making Emacs available on Flathub?

[Joonas Sarajärvi]

Richard Stallman kirjoitti 20.04.2018 klo 06:53:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
> It sounds like Flatpak poses no free software ethical issues.
>
>    > The flatpak
>    > that I wrote for Emacs uses the org.freedesktop.Sdk runtime which to
>    > my knowledge is entirely free software.
>
> "To my knowledge" means "as far as I know."  Is that what you mean to
> say?
>
> If so, would you please verify that this runtime is indeed entirely
> made of free software?  I would expect that is the case, but let's
> act based on knowledge rather than guessing.
Yes, this was based on somewhat vague knowledge and a bit of hopeful 
assumption. But after some more looking into it, things still seem good 
to me.

I got into contact with developers of Flatpak at the #flatpak channel on 
the Freenode IRC network. According to them, only free software should 
be included in the runtime. This is not very visibly documented 
anywhere, but I was suggested to file them a request to add also such 
documentation.

The runtime includes a description of names and versions of software 
that is included. This comes in two separate parts [1,2] because of how 
the runtime is built in two phases, with latter phase adding software on 
top of the results from the first phase. I have browsed through these a 
few times and did not notice anything that would be a problem. Mostly 
the content looks like a typical small GNU/Linux distribution. However, 
the runtime does not include the Linux kernel or firmware that is copied 
into devices by some of the drivers that Linux includes. Thus the 
relatively common issue with GNU/Linux distributions including 
proprietary firmware should be absent.

[1] 
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/muep/519ae7c718c80a8f6d83ff248f265dea/raw/f345a81067cd25a76959cef50ae14d2960e797e2/manifest.base

[2] 
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/muep/17e52495f8eaee488c632fb962c124a1/raw/b9333c76a9d263d6d0623a8809a328e34315d6b1/manifest.json