Re: opinions of snappy packages
On Wed, 22 Jun 2016 19:51:47 +0300
Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 05:29:12PM +0100, Iain Lane wrote:
> > I don't understand this. What about Twitter clients[0], YouTube
> > clients[1], Flickr clients[2], and probably clients for many other
> > non-free web services?[3]
>
> If a piece of free software requires, for its essential function, some
> server-side software that's non-free, and there's no free
> alternatives, then I think that free software belongs in contrib. This
> is similar to a game that is free software requiring graphics or music
> that's non-free and has no free replacements: the game belongs in
> contrib.
[...]
> We also have get-ipleyer, which downloads some files from the BBC
> iPlayer service. It's in main. I think it should be in contrib.
>
> Possibly I am in a minority here?
The thing with "players" / "downloaders" is that they deal with data.
I mean, youtube is a proprietary service but what youtube downloaders
do is basically perform some "web API" requests and stream data. May
be also actually render it on the screen. What matters here is that
they merely speak a set of wire protocols and understand a set of data
formats. What contrasts this with, say, a free game relying on
non-free resources is that those resources must be physically installed
into the user's system. To rephrase, once all the components of your
system are installed from "main", your system is "free as per DFSG";
once you install something from "contrib", it means you most probably
have also installed something which is not free as per DFSG -- hence
rendering the system not-really-free FWIW. I'd say the key word here
is "installing" stuff.
So I fail to see why snapd must go in contrib. It must have a big bold
warning in the package's long description though.
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