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April 17, 2022 03:34 pm

Richard Stallman Calls for Software Package Systems that Help Maintain Your Freedoms

Last week 69-year-old Richard Stallman gave a 92-minute presentation on the state of the free software movement. Stallman covered numerous topics, but also added as an aside at one point: Ubuntu of course is a non-free distro, and I wouldn't recommend that anyone use it. Some important packages are now distributed only through their non-freedom-respecting package system, and not as Debian packages. So it's even harder than before to get any freedom out of an Ubuntu installation. But Stallman also sees a larger issue: Another area where we have problems is there are several languages which come with a package library -- basically people post packages in them. And that might be fine if they had a good criterion for the licensing of the libraries people upload into those sites -- but they're not developed by free software activists, and they don't have such a criterion. There are non-free packages in those libraries too. Now, some of them make it possible to find out whether a library is free. Some of them, it's difficult. Sometimes -- yeah, you could probably look at the source code and see what licenses are in it, and then you could look up those licenses in GNU.org/licenses/license-list.html and see if all those licenses are free... The problem is, they don't help you. At the very least they should make it easy to say, "Show me only the free packages." And then, "Show me only the GPL-compatible packages, because I'm writing a GPL-covered program, and I can't use the libraries that are not GPL compatible. And I certainly won't ever think of using a non-free library." They're not interested in helping people move forward in freedom. And so we need people to write front-ends for those package archives, which will show only the freely-licensed packages, and which can be asked to show which ones are GPL-compatible, or show only those. This way they will be usable easily by the free software community. If you like one of the languages that has this problem, please show your appreciation for that language by reconciling its use with maintaining freedom. And this leads Stallman to a related setback for the free software movement: the containers themselves that are packaging some programs with the libraries they need: The old way of doing this was you would make sure that your program said which versions of libraries it was compiled to work with, and in the source code you'd use something like Autoconf so that it could work with the various library versions. And this way you could build the program for a wide variety of free operating systems and versions of them. Well, that's some work, so some developers, they release a free program -- not all of them release free programs, but some of them do release free programs -- using containers. And the container has one set of libraries in it. And how do you really know what's in there? It's not straightforward to verify that all the libraries in the container are free, and a lot of people won't realize that they should even think about it. So the use of containers, as they are implemented nowadays by people who are not free software activists and are not particularly concerned with this question, is an obstacle to verifying that you're installing free software. Well, maybe some of these container systems could be improved, or maybe another one could be designed to solve these problems. If a container packaging system were designed by people who care about freedom, they might find good ways to satisfy this goal, as well as others. So it's something you could possibly work on.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/04/16/238221/richard-stallman-calls-for-software-package-systems-that-help-maintain-your-freedoms?utm_source=rss1.0

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