Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Freeslack website

[bill-auger]

On 03/23/2018 11:26 AM, KRT Listmaster wrote:
> That's a good point, thanks for pointing it out, it might indeed be
> worth removing.  Questions:  should this criterion be applied across the
> board?  How does this differ from say, the PureOS website having a
> link to the Purism website in the footer, which mentions plenty of
> non-free software, including a tutorial on how to enable their own
> non-free repo.  Just curious....


all good questions - more than anything, i want to see *all* of the
rules applied equally across *all* software projects, large and small,
rich or poor, past present and future - what strikes me as notable here
is that (as i understand) the main gripe the FSF has with debian is not
so much that it hosts non-free repos (they are clearly isolated
after-all); but that they intentionally direct users to them and
instructs on how to use them on their website - ive looked over the
entire pureos website in the past and could find no explicit mention of
the non free repos; but if we are to make an issue of the website of
this prospective distro (free-slack) sporting external links to non-free
repos (or links to external sites on which are found links to non-free
repos) then we must, in all fairness, make issue of pureos linking to
the puri.sm website

which leads me back to my last question to this list from yesterday -
namely: "should a distro be grandfathered in all perpetuity once
endorsed with no further scrutiny of their on-going practices?" - the
proper thing to do in such cases is to report a freedom bug to the
distro - but what if they ignore it?[1]

as long as we are nit-picking about external links on distro's websites
- i also just noticed in the top-most navbar on the pureos front page an
icon of a tweeting bird that is a link to https://twitter.com/puri_sm -
so on the face of that one can say that pureos, rather than down-playing
the association with their commercial patron that hosts it's non-free
repos, instead guides users to it (at least indirectly) in multiple ways
- not problematic perhaps in itself, because the main distro site has no
explicit instruction how to use non-free repos; but as krt says the
commercial site does host non-free repos and instructs users on how to
access them

not to harp on that point - but i mention the tweeting bird because i
know that parabola for one, takes great care to remove all such
corporate logos rather than even hint at endorsing them - for example,
when firefox v57 was released and it was noticed that iceweasel v57
shown huge "quick-link" buttons with various website logos chosen by
mozilla on everyone's "new tab" page (of youtube, google, twitter, and
facebook IIRC) forcefully replacing where normally your pinned
"favorites" might be; this was reported as a bug the very same day and
those links were removed the same day - parabola would never knowingly
direct users to any website running non-free SAAS or that requires
non-free javascript to function; especially not intentionally on the
main page of the website - there is even an open ticket to remove the
"awesome" fonts package merely because it includes such logos[2] as glyphs

i just wanted to add that to underline that most of the FSDG distros do
seem to take very diligently to the task of avoiding to steer users in
the direction of proprietary software; but others seem to be very
cavalier about it - im not sure if parabola really needs to quite as
strict as they are; but i would very much like to see all FSDG distros
take some unified stance on such issues, whatever that stance may be -
that is why i hope the review guide page[3] will be used as a consensus
across distros on how to interpret the less defined caveats of the FSDG


[1]: https://tracker.pureos.net/T57
[2]: https://labs.parabola.nu/issues/1648
[3]: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/FSDG_Review_Guide

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