Re: Agenda for board meeting on November 3rd

[Josh Triplett <josh joshtriplett org>]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2015 at 05:41:43PM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> To download anything from the Google app store requires a nonfree
> program, Google Play.  This program is known to have a back door (see
> http://gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-back-doors.html) that is
> universal or pretty close.
>
> I suspect that uploading to the app store also requires nonfree software,
> but I don't know for certain.

To the best of my knowledge it does not, though some effort is required
to avoid it.  (See some of the recent discussion about the Android SDK
and its EULA, for instance.)  It's possible that it requires proprietary
JavaScript; I have not personally tested that.

> Thus, I think the GNOME Foundation should not do this.  When we
> recommend free software for Android, let's instead recommend
> fdroid.org as the place to get them.

While I do think we should recommend fdroid.org as preferable and only
link to it (such as in links from the GNOME application and its
documentation), and avoid linking to a version in the Play store (e.g.
"To use the Foo feature, install the Foo application for Android,
available via https://f-droid.org/...";), that doesn't preclude making
the application available via the Google Play store for users who
already have that installed.  Users who have it would find it there when
searching that store, while users who do not use Google Play will not
receive any encouragement from GNOME to start doing so, and will instead
get a link to f-droid.

Doing so seems quite similar to making an application available for
Windows: we don't encourage people to run Windows, but we sometimes make
Free Software available for Windows for users who already do run it.

- Josh Triplett