[Nix-dev] Re: Separating Free/non-free package

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hello!

Michael Raskin <7c6f434c at mail.ru> writes:

>>>> There’s no such thing as “half-free software”, to me.
>>> There are lots of border cases.
>> No.  90% of the time, it’s easy to tell whether a package provides the 4
>> freedoms.  Luckily, many people have already studied at length the
>> remaining 10%, so we can build on their work.
>
> Except that they _always_ have some slightly different target, and so we
> need to do extra work to read all the conclusions. Also there are some
> border cases (some include even TeX) where free-or-not decision is not
> universally agreed upon. In such cases it is better to log all discoveries.

[...]

> You currently mention software freedom as defined by four freedoms. You
> do not exclude that you will want to separate software acceptable by FSF
> Fully Free Distribution Guidelines. The problem is that these guidelines
> are stricter than four freedoms.

Nicolas Pierron
<nicolas.b.pierron at gmail.com> writes:

> 2009/9/21 Ludovic Courtès <ludo at gnu.org>:

>> It’s “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.  See
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html for details.
>
> Ok, so you have to define what free means for all users, and what If I
> want "free beer", do you have another flag for it?  So you have
> highlighted the issue which is that "free" is not an easy term and you
> need to add more detail to it.

At this point I think we have sufficiently diverging opinions that the
effort of separating free and non-free software would be a burden, or at
least require more energy than I’m willing to give.

This is fine with me, but it means that I don’t want to invest in
Nixpkgs trunk in that area for now.

I may eventually create a branch of Nixpkgs for those who care about
software freedom and want to promote libre software.

Thanks to Nicolas and especially Michael for taking the time to
participate in this heated debate!  ;-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.