Re: Going ahead with non-free-firmware
On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 12:22:28AM +0100, Philippe Cerfon wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 11:47 PM, Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
> > Not true at all. A future change to build a more fine-grained version
> > of non-free could happen just as easily with or without this change.
>
> I don't agree.
> If there is now lots of effort put into adding another suite, people
> will probably not be all to happy doing this soon again.
They will if people care as much about that separation as they do about
separating firmware.
> > First, and more importantly, because we can very easily define exactly
> > what "firmware" means to support classifying packages, whereas we'd
> > spend a long time bikeshedding other fine-grained distinctions among
> > proprietary software and determining exactly which classifications make
> > sense to have sections for. The most critical classification people
> > have asked for separates firmware from other proprietary software; let's
> > get that implemented rather than putting it off in favor of more
> > discussion.
>
> I don't see which discussion we'd need?! There already is a definition
> on what's non-free (i.e. DFSG).
> For non-open, the definition is quite clear: all or some of the
> sources are no available.
"open" does not mean "has source available"; "Open Source" is defined
here: http://opensource.org/osd . (That link may look rather familiar,
as the OSI based their definition on the DFSG.)
I don't know of any common shorthand name for "proprietary software with
source available", but neither "non-open" nor "non-free" mean that.
> > Second, as a point of terminology (and a critical one, *not* a
> > bikeshed-painting distinction): "free" and "open" refer to the same set
> > of licenses, and the phrasing you've used would produce massive
> > confusion.
>
> I'm open for other names, I even mentioned "closed-source", even
> though I'd considered "non-open" to align nicely with "non-free".
"Closed source" commonly gets used as an antonym for "open source", so
that doesn't fix the confusion. (Personally, I prefer the term
"proprietary" to dodge the confusion entirely.)
> Actually I had the impression that many FLOSS activists differentiate
> very well between free and open, which is why it's the Free Software
> Foundation, and not the Open Software Foundation, and which is why
> some projects chose intentionally Free/Libre in their name (and I
> don't just talk about LibreOffice, where the reason may have been also
> that OpenOffice was already "taken").
FLOSS activists do differentiate between Free Software and Open Source
as philosophies, but tend to agree that both refer to almost exactly the
same set of software. Nobody who uses either term ever calls
source-available proprietary software "open"; that only tends to happen
when proprietary software advocates want to cause confusion for their
own benefit.
> > (The terms differ in what they imply about the views of the
> > person using them, and in the exact definitions used, but in practice
> > every license that qualifies as "Open Source" qualifies as "Free
> > Software" and vice versa.) "Proprietary software with source available"
> > does not qualify as either Open Source or Free Software, and we should
> > not call it either.
>
> non-open or closed-source wasn't about proprietary or not.
> unrar is a proprietary format, but the code is open, so it would go to non-free
Unrar's proprietary format has nothing to do with what suite it goes in.
Numerous packages in main read proprietary formats.
The proprietary unrar has source code available, but that doesn't make
it open.
> > And rather than spend a pile of time arguing over
> > more extensive classifications, I'd rather work on making even more of
> > non-free obsolete.
>
> But you probably must admit, that this isn't much more than a nice
> long term goal and nothing that one can expect to ever happen.
Universally? Not for a while. Piece-by-piece? That happens regularly.
Netscape. Acroread. Bitkeeper. PGP. Pine. Numerous drivers. All
made effectively obsolete by the creation of better FOSS alternatives.
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