[Dev] Fwd: Re: Article: Chromium's subtle freedom flaws

Eliot Reyna eliotime3000 at openmailbox.org
Fri Mar 24 21:47:13 GMT 2017


I think that a possible reconsideration of Iridium Browser should be a 
good idea. Nowdays, this Chromium fork made great efforts to distill the 
Chromium Browser, separating the free software components from the blur 
features that Google and/or other contribuitors embedded:

https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/wiki/Differences-between-Iridium-and-Chromium

In case that want to get more details about the progress of Iridium, you 
can follow this page:

https://git.iridiumbrowser.de/cgit.cgi/iridium-browser/tree/?h=patchview

I hope that if apply the modifications of Iridium Browser in 
qt5-webengine, it could be free (if the source code allows it, of course).

Eliot.


El 19/03/17 a las 04:32, Isaac David escribió:
> I think _little_ or _much_ evidence aren't the right quantifiers to
> approach this issue. a single piece of evidence would suffice, whether
> for Chromium or any other software. also, we should be cautious not to
> redefine things in order to spare their faults; that would simply beg
> the question of whether software foo is guilty of bar or not. along
> those lines, was the upcoming article even supposed to touch on
> Qt-WebEngine?
>
> I'm also increasingly convinced that future claims would make us an
> enormous favor if they mentioned the scope of their charges. we have
> been saying "Chromium" to mean a number of things: (a) the Chromium
> project source code repository, (b) the idealization of a generic
> Chromium binary, (c) the versions of Chromium shipped by different
> distros, (d) some sort of library/dependency derived from (a) used by
> projects like Qt-WebEngine and Electron. it's perfectly possible for
> Debian's or Fedora's version of Chromium to be free and dandy while
> the others are non-free, or any other such combination.
>
> as far as I can tell from the couple times I have stared at Debian's
> version of Chromium, **there are no non-free files there**, nor I could
> find indication of confusingly-licensed files in the aforementioned
> lintian report. the minified javascript seems to be free. also, it's
> my understanding from [0] that the non-free plugins are nowhere to be
> found in (a). ([1] suggests differently, but I'm suspicious of it).
>
> so is it fair to say Chromium is free? I think so **for Debian's**,
> even if it's just a rubber stamp. I also know Debian is pruning many
> things from (a) but that doesn't prove anything.
>
> should distros like Parabola start shipping Chromium right away?
> no. As Nicolás said, there's more to it than mere files and their
> licenses (I'm putting privacy concerns aside for a moment):
> recommending non-free software (or silently downloading non-free
> modules for that matter), missing source code for the minified
> javascript. in my estimation, accepting any of these caveats would make
> Parabola go against the Free System Distribution Guidelines.[2]
> recommending non-free software is the very reason why Firefox isn't
> shipped in Parabola either.
>
> should Parabola remove Qt-WebEngine, Electron, etc? determining what
> pieces are going into all the different projects isn't trivial for
> someone who isn't remotely familiar with the Chromium project. I think
> the next logical step for me is to learn what Debian is stripping away
> from (a) plus their build flags, check against (a) itself, then try to
> compare to projects like Qt-WebEngine and infer from there. For now
> all I can do is go on a case-by-case basis. for instance, I found
> instructions for installing Widevine in Electron[2]; which I think are
> enough to warrant blacklisting. Were that issue addressed in a [libre]
> package, I would try to look for minified javascript leaking into
> Electron, or any other such problems. I haven't looked into Qt-WebEngine
> but other devs have. they could add their own rationale to this thread.
>
> [0]: 
> http://lists.qt-project.org/pipermail/qtwebengine/2017-January/000408.html
> [1]: 
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/electron/electron/787bc8570382e98c4f204abff05b2af122e5a422/docs/tutorial/using-widevine-cdm-plugin.md
> [2]: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html
>




More information about the Dev mailing list