Subject: Re: bug#38360: Retroarch might violate FSDG

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2019 17:27:53 +0100

Hi Nicolò,

Nicolò Balzarotti <[email-masked]> skribis:

> We don't provide them _directly_, but when loading the program the first
> option is "Load core". Then, first option again, is "Download core". Here
> you have a list of "proprietary" .so.zip downloads. Retroarch, as far as I
> understand, is encouraging the download of those programs, with no
> licensing information (see [1]).  I don't know if this is ok or if we can
> patch it (hiding the "Download core" menu maybe?).

Oh, that sounds pretty bad.  In my view, it’s a problem:

  1. from a user freedom viewpoint, because the user might unwillingly
     find themselves downloading non-free code, and thus Guix is not
     fulfilling its mission;

  2. from a security and engineering viewpoint, because we certainly
     don’t want users to run code from arbitrary binaries downloaded
     from the net.

I think it definitely needs to be fixed.

> Debian _does_ provide (from their package manager) some o the cores [2],
> two of them with the non-free tag.
> If we patch retroarch to hide the download menu, to make it functional we
> should also package some free cores.

That sounds like a plan.

Would you be able to help with that?  Hopefully there are patches we can
take from Debian, no?

If nobody can work on it in a timely fashion, I would propose to remove
retroarch until someone can do this work.

WDYT?

Thanks,
Ludo’.