Re: [PROPOSAL] Builder, a build system integration for Emacs

[Po Lu]

Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:

> The mistake is that those who care about software freedom can easily
> check whether a program incorporates non-free code, _without_
> thoroughly studying that program.
>
> There are at least two options to do that, which were already
> mentioned upthread: (1) running "cargo tree -f '{l}'", which will
> display the license of each of the dependencies of the program,
> recursively (that option works out of the box), and (2) installing a
> plugin for cargo, named "cargo deny", which is itself free software,
> and with which you can check, again recursively, whether all the
> dependencies of a program are free (more precisely: have a license
> that is present in the list of licenses you have chosen to allow).

Since that plug in is not included in a default installation of Cargo,
it is still unacceptable.  And displaying each license of each package
in a deep dependency tree counts as ``studying'' in my book.

In fact, it should not be possible to install non-free software by any
means presented by the package manager; using sources which are enabled
by default or mentioned in its documentation, for example: Debian does
not enable their `non-free' repository by default, but does provide
instructions telling you how to do so.  FSF-approved GNU distributions
do neither.

> I'm not subscribed to that mailing list, which AFAIK is an internal
> mailing list with restricted access.

AFAIK, the GNU project does not make public internal policy discussions.