> On Freitag, 13. Februar 2009, Stian Rødven Eide wrote:
> > 3. The reader can have dependencies on proprietary libraries only if
> > those libraries can reasonably be considered part of the operating
> > system.
> >
> > Of special importance here is, of course, point #3. The issue arose when
> > it turned out that Skim, the primary Free reader for Mac OS X, uses the
> > operating system's proprietary libraries to render PDF files.
It seems we are a bit divided on this issue. All previous comments are
included below. Whatever we do decide upon can be changed, however, so I think
will give my vote to not accepting proprietary libraries and hope that it
helps with concluding the case. Since more people have now voted for non-
acceptance than for acceptance, I suggest we make that an official decision.
/Stian
From Georg C. F. Greve, 2009-02-09:
> My personal comments on the policy would be that dependencies to
> operating systems that are proprietary are not good, but seem
> acceptable, as this will bring at least some additional freedom to the
> user.
>
> Using proprietary languages/technologies (e.g. .NET) is acceptable if a
> Free Software implementation of that technology exists (e.g. Mono) and
> the reader is known to work with that.
>
> Dependencies on proprietary libraries is therefore an issue that depends
> whether or not those libraries can reasonably be considered part of the
> operating system libraries.
>
> If that is the case, I think we can accept it.
>
> If they need to be installed extra, I think it is not okay.
From HennR, 2009-02-22:
> +1
From Bernhard Reiter, 2009-02-16:
> The problem here is "reasonably" I think we should change #3 to explicitely
> have the PDF interpreting libraries be Free Software (no matter if they are
> part of the operating system or not). We like to have the main PDF part be
> independent from proprietary software.
>
> This means a software could be Free Software from the licensing point of
> view, but depend on proprietary parts including the operating system.
> A good rule of thumb would be, if the libraries used run on several
> operating system to produce pdf viewing/printing/annotating there.
From Hannes Hauswedell, 2009-02-22:
> I am with Bernhard on this point. We cannot tell them that Skim is a FREE
> Pdf- Reader if the parts of Skim rendering PDF are not free.
> If someone wrote a quick and dirty MIT-licensed wrapper around
> Trident/MSHTML we wouldn't call it a Free Software Web-Browser, would we?
>
> MacOSX includes a lot of libraries and applications to do all sorts of
> things, but just because there on your hard-drive when you buy a Mac that
> doesn't make them an essential part of the OS.
>
> Also from an ethical point of view, AFAICT you can't really excercise any
> of your freedoms with Skim, because all essential parts of the program are
> non- free. (If you substract the UI, which depends on Cocoa, and substract
> the renderer which is PDFkit... whats left?)
>
> I dont think pdf-rendering can be considered part of the operating system.
> If we do, than HTML-rendering or .doc-rendering would have to be considered
> part of the OS as well.