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.