Re: Creating a survey for improving the FSD

[bill-auger]

On Thu, 29 Dec 2022 06:56:55 +0100 Denis wrote:
> There is also some work in progress work by bill-auger to combine
> data from this blacklist with the free software directory, probably
> to check if the directory has problematic software[4].

there was grander goal to that - that is for the FSDG work-group
to maintain a shared list of problematic software and acceptable
remedies - the parabola blacklist just happens to be the most
complete data-set to seed from - we dubbed it the "blacklist
rescue project" - i will explain better

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?"