Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [PATCH] gnu: Add ungoogled-chromium.

[bill-auger]

the difference there is that chromium is not one piece of software
written by one person or even one modestly sized team - it is a
conglomeration of perhaps 100s of different projects written by perhaps
1000s of authors - for some files, it may not actually be known who the
author is, never mind which license they chose, or when - the word
"trust" comes into play there, because it is not clear that any one
single person on the chromium team can honestly account for everything
in the code-base, much less to authoritatively vouch for all of the
authors and various licensing

it is a more reasonable argument to make for projects with a much,
much fewer number of files and many, many fewer devs; but i think a
program this size is far beyond the benefit of reasonable doubt - and,
of course, on the other hand, if the project had many fewer files and
many fewer devs, then a comprehensive audit would not be as absurdly
difficult - so i think that is a moot point in this case

per your analogy, this is more like the owners of one building giving
you permission to go anywhere in the city, because they believe that
every other building in the city shares their trespassing policy -
though, they can not themselves, demonstrate that they have precise
knowledge of the exact number of buildings in the city, nor who their
owners are, nor their owners' trespassing policies

o/c someone could probably raise exactly the same doubts about mozilla -
luckily for us though, we are not aware of any, and so are not yet so
uncomfortably compelled to address them

most importantly, i personally dont care to argue for nor against
chromium - i just want all FSDG distros to agree on how it should be
treated, regardless of what that entails

if we can not all agree on how to interpret the FSDG, and apply it
uniformly to all distro, then the FSDG endorsement has no value and the
FSDG work-group serves no meaningful purpose to the world - we may as
well just go our own separate ways, and satisfy our own individual
fancies

that is what is truly at stake here - not this particular: "yet another
web browser"