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 _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
