Re: [GNU-linux-libre] [PATCH] gnu: Add ungoogled-chromium.

[Adam Van Ymeren <adam@vany.ca>]

On February 16, 2019 9:18:58 AM EST, Julie Marchant <onpon4@riseup.net> wrote:
>On 02/16/2019 05:25 AM, Brett Gilio wrote:
>> I agree with everything Bill said in his message, and I heavily
>> encourage all of us lurking in this mailing list with an opinion on
>the
>> matter to please state your opinion on this controversy and the Guix
>> relationship to the FSDG.
>> 
>> The free software guidelines are first and foremost put up by the
>free
>> software community by what is specified to be important to the values
>of
>> free software. This needs to be addressed sooner than later, because
>the
>> act of solidarity on the part of the community here is a tremendously
>> crucial and singular event.
>> 
>> I'd like to see the offerings of free software to grow, and include
>> chromium if chromium has a reasonable method of liberation. But there
>is
>> yet to be a complete audit to identify the problems. We can not rely
>> solely on speculation, so lets get to the bottom of this once and for
>> all.
>
>I think that assuming Chromium is no good until something no good is
>found in it is a wrong approach.
>
>I don't understand what's so complicated about this issue. In justice
>systems, we adopt an "innocent until proven guilty" system because you
>can't really prove innocence, only guilt. Would it not make sense to
>use
>this tried and tested system when evaluating whether or not a program
>is
>libre? The only argument I've seen on the matter is the way copyright
>works, but Chromium is under the Modified BSD License according to
>documentation I was able to find. If some files are not actually
>covered
>by this license, or some other license, it would be very easy to simply
>point to the file. As far as I know, and correct me if I'm wrong here,
>no one in the entire history of this claim about Chromium being
>proprietary has ever done so. If I'm wrong about this, though, then it
>seems to me that the correct action to take would be to address that
>issue, if not upstream, then in a fork.

This issue documents some chromium efforts to update to copyright on all files.  I haven't looked at the source myself yet but this bug suggests that there are still hundreds to thousand's of files with no clear license.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=28291

Someone should run their check licenses script again on the latest codebase and see what it reports.