Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > One would first have to define what qualifies as a free package, and the
  > world isn't all black-or-white there.

The definition needs interpretation, and we publish interpretations
in https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html.

  > For example, the tarball of org-mode as released by upstream [1]
  > contains Relax-NG schemas [2] distributed under a license that doesn't
  > allow modification. Does that make org-mode a non-free package?

It looks like we will have to study the situation and reach a
conclusion.

  > Another example is the intlfonts package [3], which contains some
  > Tibetan fonts with a non-commercial restriction.

That sounds like a bug.  Bugs happen, but they do not constitute
a fundamental confusion.  I will investigate.

We're talking about how well it is possible for repology.el to
distinguish free packages from nonfree packages on repology.org.

The site does not distribute these packages, it only finds out about
them by examining them.  So I don't think we need to demand that this
be 100% accurate.  If a few nonfree packages slip by, it is nothing to
tear our hair out about.  We ought to do make our code effective overall.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)