Hi Mark, and thanks for your quick reply, Mark A. Hershberger wrote: > Thomas Goirand <tho...@goirand.fr> writes: > > These captchas are different than just generic captchas, though: > > reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, > newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science > about it <http://recaptcha.net/reCAPTCHA_Science.pdf> > … > Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York > Times.
And why should we care about this? How does this changes the freeness of php-recaptcha in the therms of my reasoning? The following paragraph has nothing to do with what I wrote, but I just have few things in mind I'd like to share, as it might help you to understand what I have in mind. It's not said in what you quoted what they will do with the digitized documents, I doubt they would give it back to the people giving their time to help this work, or give it for free to anyone. Does recaptcha.net represent an association, or a foundation, with clearly established goal, and freeness in mind? You and I have no clue of this. And by the way, The New York Times, last time I checked, is owned by its shareholders: it's a commercial entity. And to just make it 100% clear, so we close the recaptcha.net website goal topic: this is absolutely NOT related to what I said. They could do whatever they like with the digitized work, in fact, they would still own recaptcha.net and be able to do whatever change they want to the therms of service and make it a service you'd have to pay for, or even close it altogether if they feel like it, or even [paste whatever non-free issue you like here], and you'd have no power to influence any of this kind of decision (and neither would anyone at Debian). Please read point 9 of this document: http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html Because we don't have the source code of the captcha system itself (you only have access to the source code of something that accesses the online service), php-recaptcha fails all of the 3 tests when we want to use it, which is a good indication that it shouldn't be considered free. > Additionally, this is part of the dependencies for CiviCRM: I have no doubts that CiviCRM must be very good, free and all. But this must NOT influence Debian's view on the freeness of one of its dependencies. A software is as free as its least free dependency, which is why we have the contrib repository. As I see it, php-recaptcha should be sent to non-free (which means anything depending on it would go in contrib). I'd be happy to see others expressing themselves here, in order to make sure I don't hold an extreme view on this. > I'm in the process of packaging CiviCRM for Debian. Which is a great idea, thank you for this work/intention, but is unrelated to my point. > I don't see a problem with providing access to reCAPTCHA for those who > want to help the Carnegie Mellon project as long as other CAPTCHA > modules are available. Please respond to my specific points about the freeness, and stay on topic, otherwise the discussion will loop and we are all loosing time. For the moment, the issue is php-recaptcha, not whoever depends on it. If at the end I was right that php-recaptcha was non-free, you should make it so that CiviCRM doesn't REQUIRES php-recaptcha, if you feel like it set php-recaptcha as a Suggest: (and not a Depends:), make it so php-recaptcha is uploaded to non-free, have other modules of CiviCRM be activated by default, and everyone is happy. Thomas -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4c1d6994.6050...@goirand.fr
