Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Adding some scummvm game(s) to the "List of software that does not respect the Free System Distribution Guidelines".

[Richard Stallman]

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  > To do that I also documented if there were known free tools to build
  > programs for the emulators, or what work was missing (reviewing
  > software like the games under free licenses mentioned before, what was
  > missing to make FSDG distros work on gaming consoles, etc).

  > I've also added well know emulators (like qemu) that have no issues as
  > it's also good to remind people that some emulators are perfectly fine.

This sounds like an important step forward.  Would you like to develop
that (with advice from others such as Bill Auger and me) into general
advice about deciding whether an emulator is good to include?

Is this kind of issue really limited to emulators?  There are other
kinds of programs which are platforms to run other programs, and I
think that they would all raise similar issues -- though perhaps there
is an empirical tendency for emulators to be used for running nonfree
programs.

Perhaps you can generalize it to be about programs with a certain
structure of use cases, rather than "emulators".

  > > of course the option remains to write some new software for those
  > > emulators yourself; but practically speaking, that requires learning
  > > some specialized esoteric programming language or machine code for
  > > those obsolete CPUs - the use-case of playing the many readily
  > > available games, is itself very small - the use-case of writing new
  > > software for those machines is much smaller, as to be negligible IMHO
  > > - i contend that unless the distro offers some free software for use
  > > with the free tool, the presence of the free tool suggests its most
  > > popular use-case (acquiring some from a third-party which does not
  > > follow the FSDG)
  > The way to go here is indeed probably to review applications and games
  > that are under free licenses to make sure that they can be built and
  > run with 100% free software. If they are packaged the emulator could
  > even be a bit hidden when possible by for instance making a script or
  > .desktop files to launch the game inside the emulator directly, so
  > users would just see the emulator as a dependency like any other
  > dependency and not directly interact with it.

This suggests to me that the criterion for making this judgment should
be the existence of used and maintained free applications that depend
on that emulator or platform for their use.

  > Another way would be, if I was wrong about the FSDG, to inform users
  > that none of the third party repositories are vetted by the
  > distribution, and still try to document at least 100% free repositories
  > somewhere (like on the Libreplanet wiki, in some FSF/GNU article,
  > on distributions wiki, etc). 

To include an emulator or package manager in a distro is one thing.
To include (virtually) lots of nonfree programs that run on it is
quite another.  Merely warning users that it tends to lead to
installing nonfree programs is not enough.

We clearly have the duty to change things so that the emulator or
package manager _does not_ lead people into installing these nonfree
dependent packages.

That's why I raised the question of how to do that with Cargo.

Each time we fix one of these problems, it will give us a good
opportunity to point out the difference between free software and open
source, to a subcommunity that probably has not paid attention to it.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)