Replicant 6.0 early work, upstream work and F-Droid issue

[Posted August 10, 2016 by ris]

The Replicant blog reports that Replicant is being updated from Android 4.2 to Android 6.0 by Wolfgang Wiedmeyer. Among many other improvements, Replicant 6.0 should bring full device encryption and SELinux support. The F-Droid issue centers around the discovery of software that does not comply with the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines in the F-Droid repository. "While the list of such anti-features is displayed in red when selecting an application in F-Droid, applications with anti-features are still listed aside compliant ones. This is also quite confusing since free software isn’t expected to contain such anti-features in the first place."

... F-Droid issue

Posted Aug 11, 2016 17:18 UTC (Thu) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link] (1 responses)

When I started to using Android (CM7, IIRC) some years ago, I also started using F-Droid (I never tried any other repository, so I can't compare it to e.g. Google), and remember that I could chose not to see applications depending on non-free software or non-free services. At some point this possibility disappeared. Now there are only "per app" warnings, but no filters anymore. It would be nice to have the old behaviour back.

In same cases I'm not sure, what the warnings in the application description mean. E.g. Firefox shows: "promotes non-free add-ons", "tracks and reports your activity", "upstream source code is not entirely Free". Sounds not like a program F-Droid should offer at all. OTOH, how does Debian keep Firefox in the main archive?

... F-Droid issue

Posted Aug 11, 2016 18:43 UTC (Thu) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

> Firefox shows: "promotes non-free add-ons", "tracks and reports your activity", "upstream source code is not entirely Free". [...] How does Debian keep Firefox in the main archive?

Debian doesn't care about the first (Debian itself is guilty of it by virtue of hosting the contrib and non-free archives), it disables most of the second (and ignores what it can't disable), and the third is part of what triggered in the "Iceweasel" branding until Mozilla fixed it (the note in F-Droid is out of date, and only applies to older Firefox versions).

non-issue

Posted Aug 18, 2016 3:41 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link]

In the FOSS world, when one encounters a FOSS program that they mostly, but not completely like, there really isn't an issue. Fork F-Droid, host your own repos sans objectionable apps, and move on to the next priority. Oh, I'm sorry, someone is going to have to invest a bit of time and energy to do that. Yawn.