[Dev] Parabola stance on game assets

[bill-auger]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 03:28:56 +0100 pribib wrote:
>  From bill's statements, developers as it stands have the ability to 
> decide what kind of cultural works their users can access based on
> their own personal level of support for free culture. Personal
> political opinions of individual developers should not be imposed on
> users.

youre really reading too much into this - this is not an issue of anyone
imposing their will on anyone else - it is simply the case that some
package was removed from the repos - the reason why that was done is
not very important really - packages come and go routinely - maybe some
users nagged him about it incessantly for two weeks and he removed it
just to shut them up - that would only be a problem if other people
raised counter-complaints about that - i assume no one did so at the
time; so thats how it stands today

the only hard rules there are say only what software parabola will not
distribute - nothing says that parabola must distribute any software at
all - when a package is blacklisted, there should be some valid reason
given and that will allow someone at some later time to determine
whether it was strictly necessary or not and what, if anything, was done
to liberate it; but any package can be removed at any time for any
reason - if that package is useful and is meets the FSDG, it could
possibly be re-added again at any later time; but there no imperative
to do so for any package outside the base system

above all though, it is not even possible for a parabola dev to
impose anything upon users - the most striking reason why that should
be clear is that the PKGBUILD for every package that is or was ever in
parabola is still available in the arch and parabola git repos for all
of eternity for anyone to grab and build themselves - even most of the
pre-built binaries are there - it is not possible to prevent anyone
from building and installing any package - the most the dev who removed
that package imposed on anyone was that he was no longer going to build
that package for them

there is only a problem when something is introduced that should not be
there - simply removing something that otherwise *could* be there is not
a real problem - it is, at most, a minor inconvenience to those who use
it - if there are enough of them, they can speak louder to get it put
back in