Re: tunefl and other web services

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 10:11:09AM -0300, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Graham Percival
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Commercial services are ok, but non-Free software is not.  The GNU
> > coding standards are quite clear on this:
> >
> > "A GNU program should not recommend, promote, or grant legitimacy
> > to the use of any non-free program. Proprietary software is a
> > social and ethical problem, and our aim is to put an end to that
> > problem."
> > http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/References.html
> 
> neither scorio nor tunefl are considered non-free programs, so they
> should be OK. FSF's beef is with restrictive licensing, since
> licensing means you cannot freely copy the software ("share with your
> neighbors").

I must be blind, because I can't find any source code on the
scorio website.  I _do_ see apps for the ipad, and I know that due
to Apple's licensing terms, those aren't compatible with the GPL.
Of course, since scorio presumably owns their own source code,
they could be dual-licensing it.

I also can't find source on the tunefl website.  Their "legal"
page says that they allow third-party companies to track you on
their webiste, and that users shouldn't submit copywritten
material and that the users licenses tunefl.com to use that
material.

I'm not seeing how I can freely copy either of their software.
Granted, this probably gets into the realm of "software as a
service", but given that the GPLv3 specifically losed some
loopholes about that, I doubt that GNU would consider non-source
"software as a service" to be Free software.  I can check, if you
want.

- Graham