Re: [GNU-linux-libre] DSFG in perpetuity

[Jason Self]

> For chromium - I am not in favor for it and as stated I request 
> complete removal. The thing is - we must find more productive ways 
> of this because simply removing things means also we remove 
> productivity for many people (yes we have fork of Firefox but that 
> is still not 100% stable and some things work on chromium that don't
> work on Firefox and vice versa).

Sure, I agree. My understanding is that the only reason people have
brought up Chromium is because it's still listed from many years ago
[0]. As I understand it, upstream has said that they've since fixed
the problems that were raised. AFAIK no one has since done a deep dive
into Chromium to confirm and determine if any other issues exist. If
anything there is some evidence to suggest that it may very well just
be a years-old outdated report and is not valid anymore. But until
someone goes and checks...

But I don't think that the FSDG requires distros to remove a program
over allegations of freedom problems. Waiting until they're actually
confirmed also seems to follow with the FSDG, and might even be better
because it avoids removing packages only to re-add them later in cases
where the report turns out to be wrong. Or perhaps merely changing a
program would be sufficient, not a full removal. Either way, waiting
for an in-depth analysis and confirmation of any particular problem
seems a better solution.

> You have our tracker to comment on that and can't expect us to be 
> all the time everywhere, especially not on list that proved itself 
> as a bashing field.

> the easiest and most efficient way to get PureOS attention is to
> use its public bugtracker (and feel free to mail me directly - 
> whenever I have time I will jump on IRC/Matrix/WebRTC/Mumble).

I agree that this mailing list has its challenges but freedom problems
are usually not limited to just one distro. So it is good to have a
place where all of the FSF-endorsed distros can communicate and work
together on such things in a cooperative way. It would be more
difficult to organize communication to such things if the discussion
on problems were spread out among the ticketing systems of all 12
endorsed distros. For this reason I hope that you (or someone working
on PureOS) will remain involved here. Hopefully everyone involved can
keep things civil and on-topic.

[0]
https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines#chromium-browser