On Sat, 14 Jan 2017 20:05:52 -0600 Isaac David <isacdaa...@isacdaavid.info> wrote:
> It could very well be free by now, but only if you are willing to > overlook the fact that it's not actually being built from sources. > The chromium repository still distributes and uses some object > code, instead of the original free libraries. Can you point to specific examples with file paths and names? If I search for .o or .so files in the chromium source I don't find anything that looks problematic. There are a couple, but they all seem to be test files as part of test suites, not something that will end up being used and executed. > We learned that from > the aforementioned ungoogled-chromium patchset. Following > [1] I also found otherwise-free javascript that only seems to exist > in minified form in the Chromium "source" tree.[2] The example file you link seems to be a thirdpary code shipped as part of a tool called "catapult", which itself as far as I understand it is a tool for performance analysis. I don't see that file or anything related to catapult in my chromium installation, so my best bet is it's only used for development and again not part of chromium as a software. The Chromium codebase is large and confusing and bundles a whole lot of stuff where it's often hard for outsiders to understand what it's doing. I'm not saying this is ideal. But I don't see any evidence yet that it's deviating from free software principles. > > Issues regarding to privacy are imho orthogonal to the free software > > state of an application, but they shouldn't pose any blocker to > > using the rendering engine. > > Orthogonal yet absolutely important, because QtWebEngine is > said to contain *all* of Chromium, not just the Blink engine. Even > if the freedom problems were fixed soon (they could be), we would > still need to worry about Qt (and therefore KDE) possibly subjecting > their users to the well-documented Google tracking. Sorry, but I don't see that as a logical conclusion. Can you be more specific what kind of google tracking you mean here? How does QT plan to use chromium? I guess the idea is that inside a QT application you can open some html renderer. I don't see why such an application would be exposed to google tracking. Chrome does connect to Google for a whole bunch of reasons, but I'd assume a lot of them are irrelevant in such a case. E.g. it wouldn't want to sync bookmarks or anything alike. -- Hanno Böck https://hboeck.de/ mail/jabber: ha...@hboeck.de GPG: FE73757FA60E4E21B937579FA5880072BBB51E42 _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list Dev@lists.parabola.nu https://lists.parabola.nu/mailman/listinfo/dev