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[task #15792] Submission of libre-sapienza


From: Andrea G. Monaco
Subject: [task #15792] Submission of libre-sapienza
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:51:01 -0400 (EDT)
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0

Follow-up Comment #4, task #15792 (project administration):

I don't know much about the Infostud server software, but it probably falls in
one of the two following cases:

1) it is developed by people working for the university and is used solely by
the university; in that case it is "private software" according to this
article https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html, so it is free software
in a trivial sense; 
2) it is developed by some third party, like a private company; in that case
it might be free or proprietary for the university.

But I think it really doesn't matter. 
My client talks with this server using HTTP requests and JSON responses, which
are standard protocols. The server is not a *dependency* of my software,
because my software is cabable of running fully without the server; the
server's job is to provide answers and some services to the client using some
kind of protocol or convention. 

For the same reason you wouldn't say that a web browser depends on a web
server, and by the way there are free web servers and proprietary web servers.

You wouldn't say either that the Telegram client depends on proprietary
software, even though the only Telegram server available is proprietary.

There's also another ethical point: if you enroll at this university, right
now you are *forced* to use a proprietary client in order to progress in your
academic career, for example to try exams and pay tuitions. 
My client would try to provide some of these features as a free replacement
(while some other features would be really difficult to replace for technical
reasons). So it would make a substantial difference for the freedom of many
people.

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