GNU bug report logs - #34565
ungoogled-chromium may contain Widevine DRM

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From: ng0 <ng0 <at> n0.is>
To: Marius Bakke <mbakke <at> fastmail.com>
Cc: 34565 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Leo Famulari <leo <at> famulari.name>
Subject: bug#34565: ungoogled-chromium contains Widevine DRM
Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2019 11:14:17 +0000

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Marius Bakke transcribed 1.2K bytes:
> Giovanni Biscuolo <g <at> xelera.eu> writes:
> 
> > Hello,
> >
> > maybe Marius Bakke have something interesting to say about his
> > judgements on this "DRM matter"
> 
> [...]
> 
> > to sum it up: AFAIU for users to be able to use Widevine they must
> > create a custom package definition _outside_ official Guix channels
> > *and* download the shared object "libwidevinecdm.so" from Chromium,
> > installing it "manually" system wide or locally
> 
> This analysis is correct.  For DRM to work, the user has to build with
> "enable_widevine=true", and then somehow obtain 'libwidevinecdm.so' and
> make the browser use it.

Can this bug be closed?
The wording is very vague ("may") and for Guix to distribute widevine.so
legally, you have to get permission and sign an NDA with Google, both of
which are reportedly hard for 3rd party devs even, not sure how hard it is
for new operating systems. Your stand on software with NDAs should be clear
(as per policy not applicable, no NDAs).
So even if traces of the code to build this might still be left, you have
to master additional steps to make it work, and after having read some
of widevine.so I doubt it would work out of the box with Guix System
(elfpatching could get it to work with Guix, but you are still entering
the field where official distribution requires legal paperwork).

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