Re: [GNU-linux-libre] is this work-group still serving the community?

[bill-auger]

On Tue, 05 Oct 2021 18:29:07 +0200 Ricardo wrote:
> If the terms of 7.80 were non-free then nmap should have been 
> removed rather than freezing it at 7.80.

i agree - people are suggesting that; and i suspect that is the
reason why the FSF has not responded in all this time - in any
case, the FSF has asked distros to hold it back until further
notice, and no further notice has yet to come

ive read both licenses and they both appear to be lacking some
of the four freedoms, very explicitly - the key to this issue is:
"who decides what is libre or not?" - IMHO, such decisions
reduce to nothing more or less than: "does it offer all four
freedoms?" - i prefer the latter; because it has an objective
answer, and the criteria come directly from the FSF

the FSDG work-group does not need to make such decisions, and
neither do distros - the evidence and liberation procedures are
usually so clear, that they never get discussed outside of each
distro - for the most part, it is simply amortizing the
work-load of discovering the relevant objective facts about, and
liberation procedures for, some contentious programs; then
presenting them to the FSF for final decisions, if necessary

rather than each distro repeating the same auditing work and
deciding for itself what "libre" means; it would be more
efficient if a collaborative team audited contentious software
for all distros, and presented the results to the FSF for the
final decision, binding upon all distros - IMHO, it would be more
respectable as well; because it demonstrates a base-line
consensus among the FSDG distros, regarding the minimal
liberation procedures

thats not to mention, that these are among the grunt-work for
any distro - its not the fun or sexy stuff that any dev perfers
to spend time on - people should be eager to pool their efforts
on these boring administrative chores

in contrast, jean is arguing that it is better for each distro to
decide for itself, which programs are libre (or that some
distros may be "more than 100% libre") - that is purely anarchic
though, which makes the FSDG meaningless (as it would for any
conventions, guidelines, or standards) - and it results in each
distro doing redundant work

i believe that most FSDG issues are purely objective questions
with clear answers and solutions, requiring no re-interpretation
of the FSDG; so any conflicting interpretation would be easily
proven erroneous

eg: which licenses? 
    which files do each license apply to?
    are these two licenses compatible?

in most cases, there should be no disagreement about such
obvious properties