[bug#30211] [PATCH 4/4] gnu: Add streamlink.

[Leo Famulari]

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 02:05:44PM +0300, Oleg Pykhalov wrote:
> Leo Famulari <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> [...]
> 
> > It would be helpful to mention some of the services that it can be used
> > with.
> 
> Or do you mean to list those services as an example?
> 
> The issue is I don't know what are free and non-free.
> 
> From streamlink source 'plugins/' directory:

Wow, long list! I would just mention a few major ones so that people
searching with `guix package --search` might get a useful result.

As for the free-ness of the services, I don't think that services are
meaningfully free or non-free in the sense that a piece of software is.
The whole point of a service is that someone else runs it, hence the
term "Service as a Software Substitute" (SaaSS) [0].

But we should still exercise our good taste in this matter. And I don't
know what Guix's guidelines, the Free System Distribution Guidelines,
have to say about it. In any case, we have youtube-dl packaged, and that
mentions YouTube explicitly.

[0] To quote Richard Stallman:

"Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaSS will be
solved by developing free software for servers. For the server
operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they
are proprietary, their developers/owners have power over the server.
That's unfair to the server operator, and doesn't help the server's
users at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't
protect the server's users from the effects of SaaSS. These programs
liberate the server operator, but not the server's users."

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html

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