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

[Quiliro Ordóñez]

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.

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

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

I would like the FSF to take a stance on this immediately. I think a
week is more than enough, 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