On Mon, Oct 05, 2015 at 08:58:19PM +0200, Timothy Hobbs wrote:
Dear list,
I have used Debian for many years now, and I have come to trust it as a source of software that is safe. That is, the software
that I install with apt-get is not spy-ware, nor ad-ware, nor malicious in any other way. I also have had the overwhelming
feeling that the software is "on my side", not trying to haggle me me into upgrading to something more expensive or to
subscribe to some paid service.
Lately, I feel that this trust has been violated. Most notably, by the addition of advertisements to iceweasel's new tab page.
http://timothy.hobbs.cz/iceweasel-ads.png See the "Booking.com" sponsored link.
I would like to see an in-depth discussion of where Debian draws the line when it comes to interaction of packaged software
with commercial services. Iceweasel has, for years now, used google.com as the default search engine. I doubt few would
disagree with that choice, despite the fact that Mozilla gets paid by Google to make it that way.
Another interesting example is that of the open source Atom text editor:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=747824 Atom is, as far as I can tell, mostly a front end to github's closed
source services. Should the DFSG allow open source software that is merely a thin front end to something closed source?
Another example is docker.io, which is almost inseparably integrated with Docker Inc's comercial Docker hub.
I am *very* interested in your opinions on, what is for me, a rather distressing and unclear issue.
My opinion is that Debian should provide free software. One of the
freedoms that brings is freedom to use it how you want. So you have a
web browser that can connect to gnu.org just as easily as it can to
microsoft.com.
For less general-purpose programs, such as a twitter client, the same
criteria can be applied. Is the program itself free? That is, can anyone
use it as they see fit? I think this implies a certain openness to the
API, too - that is, if you have the source of the client AND are free to
modify it, then it follows that you could reverse-engineer a compatible
server and point the client at that (maybe you'd need to do that in the
source, but it's still possible). I seem to recall that this has been
done with multiplayer games - the official server has gone offline, but
people have created compatible servers to fill in the gap.
So, in other words, software in Debian SHOULD allow for the possibility
of interacting with a free server. This doesn't necessarily mean that
there must be a configurable item - maybe you have to go through the
source and replace all instances of "commercial.example.org" with
"free.internal.lan", but the license of the software MUST allow you to
do that. Making the server name configurable could, after all, be a
wishlist bug.
What I'm not so sure about is the possibility of companies protecting
their servers legally. Could a company say "here's a client which you
may legally point at any other server, but you may NOT re-implement our
server", and therefore make that re-pointing useless?