[GNU-linux-libre] ungoogled chromium reported in Guix and unremoved after 8 months

[Quiliro Ordóñez]

Hello. I would like you to help me with the following issue. This is a
report I have received from some GNU libre distro hackers:

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Chromium/webengine/electron issue

It is not reasonable to assume that some program is free software merely
because someone adds a licence to the root dir.
- the person who adds that license also needs to have the right to do so
as the copyright holder, and permission to do so from the holders of all
other copyrighted parts.
Chromium is an aggregate of hundreds of projects written by probably
thousands of authors - the vast majority of which are not on the
chromium dev team - the main case for concern is that its own developers
are not certain about the copyrights of all of its parts, as
demonstrated by the 10 year old bug report that was never closed

The codebase is 3-4 GB large and no one knows - that alone is a real
problem for any codebase to become such size that no one wants to audit
it - it is much the same situation as Linux; except that the linux-Libre
team diligently removes anything non-free that enters the codebase
upstream. No one is doing that for chromium - its not what ungoogled
team cares about.

But, IMHO there is now a more concerning issue related to it mess this
has been discussed at length on the FSDH mailing list over the years and
the consensus was that it was not fit for any FSDG - and all FSDG that
still had it, removed it. But, about six months ago Guix decided they
would add it, and they completely disregarded the concerns of the FSDG
group answering essentially no more than "I dont see a problem - we are
adding it anyways". That created a very uncomforable problem in the FSDG
community - one of the criteria for the new FSDG review process would
prevent any new distro from being endorsed if it had Chromium - ppl
repeaedly asked the Guix team to help resolve that by offering a
satisfying liberation procedure; so that every FSDG could add Chromium
is they wanted it.

*******

This the still open bug report in Guix:
http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/34565

This is the analysis of Chromium and Ungoogled Chromium by Hyperbola:
https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:main:chromiums_freedom_flaws

This is the discussion on the gnu-linux-libre mailing list:
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2019-02/msg00063.html
https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2019-02/msg00000.html

I would like the FSF to take a stance on this immediately. I think a
week is more than enough time, considering that this issue has been
analyzed before. I feel that a distro that has a freedom critical bug
should not take such a long time delay to correct it.

Quiliro Ordóñez
FSFLA board member