User:GNUtoo

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About me

Interesting links

  • Free_Software_Directory:Requirements: What can be included in the Free Software Directory
  • Category:Collection: Link to pages about specific collection of software. Note that some of these pages also act as lists to review and the software that has not been reviewed yet may contain nonfree software. The category itself may also not be fit for software for the FSD. For instance it is yet undecided if Android-only applications are fit for the FSD or not, yet there are some categories related to that. The same applies to firmwares for instance. See Free_Software_Directory:Requirements for what has been decided already.

FSD Meetings

Next meeting TODO

13 October 2023 FSD meeting

  • Prettytable and PrettyTable
    • TODO: We need to migrate both and redirect the removed one to the remaining one.
    • Prettytable seems to be better since we have Gimp and Gcc.
  • Can we add packages? Reference: Woob has Debian and pip packages.
    • FSDG distros will be added in the drop down menus in resources.

19 May 2023 FSD meeting

To discuss for the 19 May 2023 meeting

  • Specific applications:
    • Conversations.im:
      • Are Android applications now OK?
      • Is Conversations.im still OK?
      • How to review build dependencies?
    • Phoronix_Test_Suite
      • Can it be added? Point to Guix or Parabola versions?
    • Hackrf:
      • Contains files that depend on nonfree software. Only bugreport in Parabola.
    • Bladerf:
      • Contains files that depend on nonfree software, OK in Parabola
    • FreeRTOS: If Android applications are OK, are standalone firmware OK? If so in which conditions? Can we review and add FreeRTOS as it's a dependency for several firmware projects? If it's packaged does it becomes OK?
  • Licensing compatibility
    • Compatibility between the Libreplanet wiki and FSD (difference: FSF copyright assignments)
    • FSDG VS FSD differences (for source code)

19 May 2023 FSD meeting results

Software that don't run on GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd

The FSD does accept applications that are fully free and that runs on GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd.

But how to deal with applications that don't run on GNU/Linux is still undecided (craigt needs to discuss with the FSF about it).

So far there are various applications that don't run on GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd in the FSD but that doesn't mean that they will be kept:

  • An Android-only application: Conversations.im. Here it is unclear which version was reviewed, or if it depends on nonfree software or not. For instance the nonfree Android SDK is a very common nonfree dependency for Android applications. So far very few Android applications were confirmed of not depending on nonfree software (we have some not very useful applications like a hello world for instance).
  • Various firmwares: The FSD has various firmwares, some of them are packaged by distributions, and some of them aren't but build fine on FSDG distributions and interact with drivers or applications packaged in these distributions. Some of them like Gnuk also work on GNU/Linux and interact with software like gpg, and their status is somewhat comparable between when running on top of GNU/Linux and on standalone hardware. Rockbox is probably the only firmware that is completely separate here as in theory it runs on GNU/Linux but the port is unusable (too bugy/experimental) while it works fine on top of hardware.
External repositories and Phoronix_Test_Suite

Someone added the Phoronix_Test_Suite software to the free software directory, and it was kept in review for some time, and we used this meeting to try to understand if we could finally add it or not.

The Phoronix_Test_Suite software is a benchmarking software that runs some tests. Its source code is most likely fully free software.

But it contains tests that download and run nonfree software software. It also refers to third party repositorie(s) for updating these tests (so these third party repositorie(s) have the exact same issue).

It is possible to use it in a way that is FSDG compliant as Guix and Parabola do that: They either patch and/or configure the build to exclude the problematic tests.

It was decided to not add Phoronix_Test_Suite.

Discussions also took place in understanding how to best convince upstream project to become FSDG compliant. For phoronix test suite it would be complicated to do better than the current situation that enables FSDG distributions to ship FSDG compliant packages with minimal efforts.

For other packages like Bladerf and Hackrf it might however be possible to convince the upstream project to separate the firmwares with nonfree build dependencies in other repository if we ask nicely and explain why that could be an advantage for them.

Copyright

GNUtoo asked questions on how to best represent licenses of projects when the projects aren't GNU and don't have all their copyright in a single file (like COPYING or AUTHORS) Gnuk was used as an example.

But the question was asked at the end so how to best represent something like Debian Copyright where we'd add the license of each file. But it wasn't answered since it was asked near the end and that the question was difficult to understand.

At least Craig told that the Gnuk copyright could be simplified as GPLv3-or-later. So the FSD might not require information on copyright that is that precise as long as the overall license is correctly identified. But if we want to do so it's unclear if we need to add the information in License coyright or License information.



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