Hi all,
I just wanted to give a quick update on the comments received so far. If you have any feedback to team@ I'll be happy to pass it on.
From Stian Rødven Eide, 2009-02-13:
- The reader itself needs to be Free Software
- The reader should be under development (with the latest commit being
within the last 1.5 years) 3. The reader can have dependencies on proprietary libraries only if those libraries can reasonably be considered part of the operating system.
So far, no comments have been made on points 1 and 2. I will presume them agreed upon unless objections are made in the next few days.
Point 3 is still subject to discussion however, as opinions are a bit divided on the issue. I'd appreciate some more thoughts, comments and/or votes. Both Bernhard and Georg, whose comments are included below, have made good points.
I am rather open to either outcome myself, but lean somewhat towards acceptance for the following reasons. a) Finding out which libraries are used is not as easy or obvious as locating the licence. b) As the readers themselves are Free Software, everyone have the possibility to change which library is used. c) Non-acceptance of using (the OS's) proprietary rendering libraries will currently only affect Skim, which apparently is the most used Free reader for MacOS.
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 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.
Hi.
Stian Rødven Eide schrieb:
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.
+1
HennR
Am Sonntag, 22. Februar 2009 14:18:52 schrieb Stian Rødven Eide:
Hi all,
I just wanted to give a quick update on the comments received so far. If you have any feedback to team@ I'll be happy to pass it on.
From Stian Rødven Eide, 2009-02-13:
- The reader itself needs to be Free Software
- The reader should be under development (with the latest commit being
within the last 1.5 years) 3. The reader can have dependencies on proprietary libraries only if those libraries can reasonably be considered part of the operating system.
So far, no comments have been made on points 1 and 2. I will presume them agreed upon unless objections are made in the next few days.
Point 3 is still subject to discussion however, as opinions are a bit divided on the issue. I'd appreciate some more thoughts, comments and/or votes. Both Bernhard and Georg, whose comments are included below, have made good points.
I am rather open to either outcome myself, but lean somewhat towards acceptance for the following reasons. a) Finding out which libraries are used is not as easy or obvious as locating the licence. b) As the readers themselves are Free Software, everyone have the possibility to change which library is used. c) Non-acceptance of using (the OS's) proprietary rendering libraries will currently only affect Skim, which apparently is the most used Free reader for MacOS.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
In Solidarity Hannes