Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Perfectionism

[Jeff F.]

Le vendredi 11 novembre 2016 à 05:50 +0300, Dmitry Alexandrov a écrit :

Nowhere in there is "open source" mentioned alone and carelessly like you depict it to be. It's always "Free software" or "Free/Libre and Open-Source". There is no issue with that.

May I point out the page where it is:

“Even if they are “part” of an open-source program, blobs are no less dangerous. That is why such occurrences are considered “tainted” open-source software.

Beyond privacy and security concerns, troubleshooting bugs in proprietary binaries (and “tainted” open-source software) is nearly impossible. Prominent Linux kernel developers have made an official statement to that effect.

http://wayback.archive.org/web/20161111023919/https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/

[...]

One might suggest however, that ‘open source’ here used in the literal sense, not as euphemism for ‘free’ — the whole page is about sources that should be available to examine and says nothing about rights to use them for any purpose, modify and distribute.  But that only raises the question why emphasis was made this way.

Precisely. The term "open-source" is used with carefully weighted technical intent on that page, because the question being explained there is purely about the *source code* and not the freeness of it, as you have yourself deduced.

To make it obvious why there is no other effective way to say it, take the first paragraph that says "Even if they are part of an open-source program, blobs are no less dangerous." and try swapping "open-source" with "Free Software"; it would not work at all, because there is no such thing as a Free Software program with "blobs" in it, in theory. To consider such a formulation valid would requires some heavy mind contorsion, it just doesn't make sense.

Unless there are further suggestions for improvement to that page (that are not detrimental to its readability -- let's not turn it into an encyclopedia, and we're not out there to repeat the entirety of the FSF+GNU websites ;) I do not intend to modify it on my own, I think it already does its explanatory job fairly well, so far.