How not to recognize free hardware [LWN.net]

How not to recognize free hardware

Posted Oct 21, 2010 13:01 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: How not to recognize free hardware by aggelos
Parent article: How not to recognize free hardware

Where does it say that listing a proprietary application is OK? When they say that the choice "comes directly from the user" they mean exactly that. Look at the history of the ghostscript license to see how they feel about mentioning proprietary software.

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How not to recognize free hardware

Posted Oct 21, 2010 14:08 UTC (Thu) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]

Oh, I think I get how you're reading the text now. You're taking "a general-purpose facility for installing other programs" to be something like dpkg instead of something like apt. That is plausible, even though if they wanted to do that I'd expect they'd phrase it in no unambiguous terms. It would be interesting to get a clarification from them. Hint, hint :)

My other points still stand of course.

"Hint, hint"

Posted Oct 21, 2010 14:29 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Yes, it might be nice to get clarification from the FSF.

But: the FSF refuses to talk to anybody who will not promise to use their "approved terminology." I am unwilling to make such promises. So I'll not be contacting them for clarification.

"Hint, hint"

Posted Oct 21, 2010 16:16 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link]

I take it that means you're not going to change the name of the site to "GNU/Linux Weekly News." ;) Something about the tone of your comment suggests that someone has tried before, and that it didn't go well.

</humor>

"Hint, hint"

Posted Oct 21, 2010 22:10 UTC (Thu) by aggelos (subscriber, #41752) [Link]

Well, I mailed Brett Smith about it and just got his reply:

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On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 20:52 +0200, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
> > It is not clear if "a general-purpose facility for installing other
> > programs" includes a facility like APT (where you typically download a
> > default list of packages that are available for installation from a
> > remote site). Would such a facility that, among hundreads of packages,
> > included packages of non-free software meet your criteria if it didn't
> > go out of its way to promote the non-free packages?

If the list of packages that is used on the device as shipped includes
nonfree software, then such a facility would not pass muster under the
criteria, no. We definitely had apt and its package repositories in
mind as one common facility when we wrote that section. If the default
repositories include nonfree software, that's "steer[ing] users towards
installation" of the software."

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So it seems that your reading is correct after all. I'll ask them to make the wording clearer if possible.