the issues discussed in previous thread (non-free vs anti-feature
blacklists) are mostly just details and could always be changed at a
later time - the only thing i am asking for now are some special
"Category:" pages for grouping the items, which requires admin
privileges - it matters not at all where they are to be referenced or
grafted onto any external hierarchy - they do not strictly need to exist
yet, but that all of the items i add would have "red" links to their
categories and would be essentially un-categorized until those special
category pages are actually created
regarding the "semantic" templates: as i understand, they are elaborate
data structures for the purpose of categorizing items sharing various
common, well-defined search-able properties; but there is very little
information like that in the blacklist data that would be appropriate
for these sort of "tags" other than the one single property that is
which of the categories that i have proposed each belongs to - the
important information is in the detailed descriptions that are not
appropriate for those semantic templates - for that reason (that there
is only one common property to categorize on), the "Category:" pages
alone serve the same purpose
the btw the existing
"List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines"
page has it's own semantic template defined already, so perhaps that
could be preserved; though as i said it is not very useful unless the
entire descriptions are included and im not sure how appropriate that is
this from our previous discussion regarding the 'Antifeatures' and
'FSDG_Blacklist_Rescue pages':
David Hedlund wrote:
bill-auger wrote:
- i dont have any preference regarding those pages - Category: page have
magic that would allow the individual blacklist items to be listed
automatically as they are created and made available to API queries, RSS
feeds, and what not - and it also serves to group programs by the
reasons why they are not in the FSD rather than lumping them together on
one massive main page
if you think there should be a consolidation of "all software not in the
FSD", we could discuss that, such as adding the parabola "your-privacy"
blacklist or exactly which categories there should be; but that was not
all what i was thinking for now - these details can always be adjusted
later
"This project exists to catalog the software that is currently
blacklisted by FSDG distros and to provide clear descriptions of the
reasons why they fall short of FSDG-compliance." -
https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Free_Software_Directory:FSDG_Blacklist_Rescue
I like that, but I also want to include some Firefox add-ons that were
hard to identify as free or nonfree, and Firefox is not a distro.
all i can say to that is that the existing blacklists contain only
information regarding software packages that were either once available
in parabola or trisquel or were proposed for inclusion and rejected - if
any of these firefox add-ons were packaged, then i would have some
information on them - but the most important thing to say is that if it
can not be determined whether a program is free or non-free, then there
is very little that can be said about that program in terms of how to
solve the problem - that is very unfortunate at best, because such
programs are destined to remain on the blacklist forever and reduces the
blacklist to more of a "wall of shame" trash-bin rather than a valuable
resource for liberating the software
that approach to blacklisting is essentially to consider all firefox
add-ons as free software until someone reports otherwise; which is quite
the opposite of the truth - there are probably licensing issues with
more than 90% of the add-ons on the mozilla site - as you noticed
yourself they often simply state the license on the web page and do not
mention any source code; nor include a license or any statement of
license in the distributed package which is likely a license violation
on the face of it in many cases
indeed firefox is not a distro and firefox add-ons are generally not
packages so there is actually nothing to blacklist - one could only
point out their existence and warn against their use (i would not envy
the person assigned with the task of compiling that list with any degree
of completion) - for these, it would be more sensible to recommend that
the icecat add-ons page be considered as a white-list and to consider
everything on the mozilla site as non-free until proven otherwise - if
some useful add-on can be shown to be free software then it should be
added to the ice add-ons page which is severely lacking attention