Re: [directory-discuss] FSF opinion on chromium, QtWebEngine, electron

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira]

I decided to try helping a little, so I used licensecheck (from
devscripts version 2.14.1ubuntu0.1, available in the official Trisquel
repositories, and as the version string implies, provided directly by
Trisquel's upstream --- because no Trisquel-specific patches where
made).

So I have attached the results of using `licensecheck' inside the "src"
repository of Chromium, which was cloned like this:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
git clone --depth 1 "https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git"; 
"chromium"
cd "chromium"
licensecheck -c '.*' -r * > "../licensecheck_chromium.txt"
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Note that this repository goes beyond the source files for GNU/Linux. I
decided not to use "depot_tools" as suggested by Google/Chromium because
I don't really trust this algumentation just to fetch the source
files, which could be simplified in their end.

One thing I notice is that `licensecheck' incorrectly considers license
notices for "MIT" (X11 or Expat, the latter which is more common) and
BSD-likes both which are shorter than those required by the license to
be valid. The same applies to {AG,F,G,LG}PL. A perhaps off-topic note on
the comparison between official notices is described in [1].

Besides, many files have licenses classified as "UNKNOWN" by
`licensecheck', I didn't check each of these files, but I guess they
have at least one copyright-and-license notice that applies to them but
which comes from a "master" or parent file. Still, not putting the
copyright-and-license notices in the files leaves this kind of doubt ---
and this laziness isn't recommended anyways.

Finally, according to `licensecheck', many notices fail to specify the
version of the licenses.

[1] Actually, if one compares the official license notices for
{AG,F,G,LG}PL between the officials for "MIT" and BSD-likes, one can see
that the {AG,F,G,LG}PL are shorter because they don't require putting
the full license text in the notice.

licensecheck_chromium.txt
Description: Text document

bill-auger <address@hidden> writes:

> i would like to ask about the FSF opinion of chromium and electron-based
> programs - as you probably know there was a big controversy this year
> over the chromium code-base and that caused parabola to remove and
> blacklist chromium and all QtWebEngine and electron-based programs - no
> one has heard any news of a change of opinion about this or any
> investigation so that is how it remains today because parabola wants to
> align with the FSF's opinion
>
> recently though users have been noting that there are a number of such
> programs listed in the directory[1][2] and the FSF has recently
> published an interview promoting the QtWebEngine-based qupzilla
> browser[3] so there are some mixed signals floating about and parabola
> has no clear answers to tell the users who want these programs restored
>
> has there been any change in the FSF opinion of chromium? if no, should
> those programs be removed from the directory? or if yes, could parabola
> restore them to their repos?
>
> [1]: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
> [2]: https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Atom
> [3]:
> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/the-licensing-and-compliance-lab-interviews-david-rosca-of-qupzilla
>

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