Re: BeOrg

[Adonay Felipe Nogueira <adfeno@hyperbola.info>]

Morever, considering the availability only in Apple's App Store, how
will users exercise freedom 1, which also includes the freedom to reuse
the adaptation in the same environment/device? This "retake' of freedom
0 in freedom 1 is also mentioned in [1].

Currently:

- BeOrg doesn't seem to be "open source" (according to the Open Source
  Initiative's Definition, see [2]), unless of course we're missing
  something and the full license text, copyright notice, license notice
  and complete corresponding source are referenced/mentioned or
  distributed when the app is used, which I see as unlikely;

- doesn't seem to be free/libre either, because it depends on a package
  manager which has no easy way to completely manage trusted signatures
  understood by such package manager and requires installation only of
  signed packages (this last requirement isn't bad, but the absense of
  the trust management feature makes it worse). This is somewhat
  analogous to the situation found in almost all manufacturer-provided
  smartphones with Android and bootloaders preinstalled, besides this,
  iThings also come with Restricted Boot (not to be confused with Secure
  Boot or with EFI/UEFI, for the differences see [3]).

[1] <http://dcc.ufmg.br/~lcerf/rms.webm>. First audio track has original
speech in English, second one has translation in Brazilian
Portuguese. However this nete is only accurate for the speech, because
the intermediate audio language is somewhat mixed.

[2] <https://opensource.org/osd>.

[3] <https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libby/m/embracing-secure-boot-and-rejecting-restricted-boot-matthew-garrett/>.

2018-01-03T19:26:07+1100 Tim Cross wrote:
> Bottom line is that referencing this software in the org manual would
> contravene the GNU guidelines and underlying philosophy of the
> GPL. While you will find references to non-GPL software/platforms, these
> are not references which promote non-free solutions, but references in
> support of adopting free solutions on non-free platforms.
>
> One of the biggest threats to software freedom and a significant issue
> for the FSF is the attractive lure of convenience. I feel it would be a
> mistake to ignore the guidelines in favour of promoting a non-free
> solution on the basis it would be beneficial to users. The FSF and GPL
> are built on a clear philosophy of supporting and promoting software
> freedom and to sacrifice those principals because there is only a
> non-free solution to satisfy a need is short sighted and
> contradictory.
>
> It appears the software is actually free to download and has an 'in app'
> donation request. It also appears the software makes extensive use of
> other 3rd party libraries. This makes me wonder if it would be
> reasonable to contact the author and ask if they would be prepared to
> change the license to an acceptable open source one. This would not
> prevent them from continuing to request donations and would then enable
> Org to reference the software on the org site and in the manual, which
> would in turn likely increase app visibility and lead to more donations
> to the author. This could be a win for everyone, including the author.
>
> Of course, the other question to ask is "If beorg is so much better than
> available open source equivalents, such as mobileOrg, how has one
> individual  been able to do that when the org community cannot?"
>
> Tim
>
> Ilya Shlyakhter <ilya_shl@alum.mit.edu> writes:
>
>> The org features page at https://orgmode.org/features.html, and the
>> Org manual, mention MobileOrg, but not the newer BeOrg app
>> ( http://beorgapp.com/ ).  Maybe add a reference to it?
>
>
> --
> Tim Cross

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