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

Elyzabeth von Reuenthal elyzabethvonreuenthal at iserlohn-fortress.net
Wed May 10 15:11:42 GMT 2017


> Stallman is sitting on an article which he was going to post, but said
> "It is going to take time. (March 5, 2016)
Soon(TM). In the meantime, enjoy a slightly broken KDE.

> The article does raise the issues, link to the infringing source code,
> and mentions his proposed fix (GNU fork of Ungoogled-Chromium). I sent
> him the original draft article explaining the issue and he re-wrote
> several portions of it.
Article talks about Chromium, we talk about QtWebEngine. By this logic, 
because Firefox has freedom flaws, then any Firefox fork, _because it is based 
on Firefox_, has freedom flaws as well.

> As far as being "Googled", grep -r "google.com" should give you the
> answer for any chromium based project. 
- This software is unfree.
- Ok, what are the issues?
- Go find them yourself.
No, this is so ridiculously backwards. The burden of proof should be on the 
accuser.
As it stands, all we know is that due to some etheral and intangible 
complaints and article, a package has been blacklisted. We cannot be told what 
the issues are because we should find them ourselves by trudging through source 
code in a repository that's probably pushing a gigabyte. But, for certain, the 
almighty "Google" will surely smite us if we use it.

Let me quote the Qt developers stance on this issue:
> Qt WebEngine should never 'call home' to Google servers. 

>From what I have seen on this mailing list so far, there is no intention of 
identifying the problems you are so afraid of, or any intention of actually 
doing anything to fix them. Upstream will *gladly* accept any and all reports, 
or fixes for that matter, but no. It's based on code that was written by 
"Google". Therefore all "Googled".

Please set realistic goals for yourselves. Neither forking and maintaining 
QtWebEngine is viable, nor is rewriting software to use QtWebKit. The one is 
simply not a drop-in replacement of the other.

Or you could, perhaps, I don't know, contact upstream mayhaps? That incredible 
idea, reporting bugs upstream, I know.
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