On Mon, 19 Jun 2023 22:54:31 -0400 Richard Stallman <r...@gnu.org> wrote: > > To do that I also documented if there were known free tools to > > build programs for the emulators, or what work was missing > > (reviewing software like the games under free licenses mentioned > > before, what was missing to make FSDG distros work on gaming > > consoles, etc). > > > I've also added well know emulators (like qemu) that have no > > issues as it's also good to remind people that some emulators are > > perfectly fine. > > This sounds like an important step forward. Would you like to develop > that (with advice from others such as Bill Auger and me) into general > advice about deciding whether an emulator is good to include? Yes, given the amount of time I spent on these discussions, I'm really interested in converting that to something more tangible.
> Is this kind of issue really limited to emulators? There are other > kinds of programs which are platforms to run other programs, and I > think that they would all raise similar issues -- though perhaps there > is an empirical tendency for emulators to be used for running nonfree > programs. Yes there is. Some compatibility layers have the same issue. For instance Wine should be OK but some other are more problematic like Waydroid where there is no FSDG compliant distribution that runs inside it (yet). It also applies to operating systems like Android etc, so we can treat the issue in a more generic way if we want. > Perhaps you can generalize it to be about programs with a certain > structure of use cases, rather than "emulators". Yes. After writing more specialized documentation, I think I finally came up with something general enough[1] that can cover all the issues mentioned. Here I took the use case of distributing software, and see where we can do that in ways that do respect the FSDG. So for instance it covers distributing software for virtual machines, operating systems, browsers, distributions and can even cover specific hardware (like gaming consoles) from the perspective contributors only running FSDG compliant distributions. And this way it avoid duplicating the information across too much different somewhat overlapping articles. > > > of course the option remains to write some new software for > > > those emulators yourself; but practically speaking, that > > > requires learning some specialized esoteric programming > > > language or machine code for those obsolete CPUs - the use-case > > > of playing the many readily available games, is itself very > > > small - the use-case of writing new software for those machines > > > is much smaller, as to be negligible IMHO > > > - i contend that unless the distro offers some free software > > > for use with the free tool, the presence of the free tool > > > suggests its most popular use-case (acquiring some from a > > > third-party which does not follow the FSDG) > > The way to go here is indeed probably to review applications and > > games that are under free licenses to make sure that they can be > > built and run with 100% free software. If they are packaged the > > emulator could even be a bit hidden when possible by for instance > > making a script or .desktop files to launch the game inside the > > emulator directly, so users would just see the emulator as a > > dependency like any other dependency and not directly interact > > with it. > > This suggests to me that the criterion for making this judgment should > be the existence of used and maintained free applications that depend > on that emulator or platform for their use. Yes, that should work fine. > > Another way would be, if I was wrong about the FSDG, to inform > > users that none of the third party repositories are vetted by the > > distribution, and still try to document at least 100% free > > repositories somewhere (like on the Libreplanet wiki, in some > > FSF/GNU article, on distributions wiki, etc). > > To include an emulator or package manager in a distro is one thing. > To include (virtually) lots of nonfree programs that run on it is > quite another. Merely warning users that it tends to lead to > installing nonfree programs is not enough. That's also what I think as it would only work for more technical users[1]. > We clearly have the duty to change things so that the emulator or > package manager _does not_ lead people into installing these nonfree > dependent packages. > > That's why I raised the question of how to do that with Cargo. I didn't look at cargo at all yet. I would probably need to learn rust along the way to understand how all that work. > Each time we fix one of these problems, it will give us a good > opportunity to point out the difference between free software and open > source, to a subcommunity that probably has not paid attention to it. Right: If some distributions only redistributes free software (for instance avoid legally accepting nonfree licenses) but that don't care at all if users are mislead into running free software without knowing it, then they probably don't really care about users freedom but only about their contributors freedom. References: ----------- [1]I was not involved in writing the FSDG criteria so what's why I was asking for clarification. And I cannot foresee all the possible consequences of interpretation of the FSDG so that's also why I asked to confirm I was on the right track. [2]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Software/research/DistributingSoftware Denis.
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