Jason Self <j@jxself.org> writes:

> A different but related matter is the build process itself. I
> understand this is not exactly related to the DRM matter but it does
> seem similiar. I can open another bug over this if needed. I have
> recently submitted upstream's Chromium 73.0.3683.45 into my FOSSology
> instance for analysis. Actually, less than a third of the total files
> were classified as "BSD-like". In total it found 162 unique licenses.
> Of course, automated licenses analysis is never perfect and I have not
> fully vetted any particular results but it does help to at least
> indicate that which is very clearly free software and that which needs
> further investigation.

To avoid duplicate work, it would be useful if you ran this analysis on
the tarball produced by `guix build --source ungoogled-chromium`.

> Even in the short time I was reviewing it I found a number of freedom
> problems. I don't mean that to be an exhaustive list of everything,
> merely an indicator of a symptom:
>
> * unrar (license denies freedom 0)

UnRAR is not present in the Guix source.

> * third_party/blink has some images under CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0

I cannot find these images: grepping for CC-BY-NC-SA or 'Creative
Commons' did not aid.  Did you record the absolute paths to these files?

> * Google Toolbar is in there, with a non-free EULA

My grep-fu is really failing me today.  Where is this located?

> Taking this and considering Guix's build process: The method of
> building seems to involve downloading Chromium, then runnning
> ungoogled-chromium over it, and then building. I'm not sure if any
> other packages have their freedom problems fixed in this way but this,
> just like build flags, should not be sufficient. Freedom problems
> should not be hidden/removed after the fact by asking the user to run a
> clean-up program after downloading the source, even if that has been
> automated by the package manager. What is sent to the end user to
> compile should itself be 100% free software and FSDG compliant from the
> beginning. If not it still amounts to distributing non-free software to
> the user when they want to, for example, do guix build -S chromium.

As Leo says, `guix build --source` should never return nonfree software
as a matter of policy.  Ungoogled-Chromium is no different: running
`guix build --source ungoogled-chromium` will run the pruning scripts
and generate a sanitized tarball, or (more likely) transparently
download an already-processed source from the build farm.