Subject: [bug#53765] V3 Patches

From: Reily Siegel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2022 19:39:40 +0200

Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> writes:

> Apparently the aws things aren't very useful and they can be patched
> out?

That is exactly what I did with the first patch I sent for clojure-tools,
which was accepted. However, this causes the tools to print warnings on
startup, as well as removing the feature of accessing S3 repositories. I
suppose these warnings could be patched out, given that the work to
packages the dependencies has already been done, I see no reason to not
resolve the issue, given that the links you sent me to Debian seem to
believe all of these dependencies fit the requirements of free software.

Elana Hashman <[email-masked]> writes:

> These deps are all open source as far as I can tell, but given that it's
> a lot of work to enable commercial/proprietary development I personally
> do not want to spend volunteer time on it. I would not block someone
> from volunteering to work on this, particularly with a commercial
> sponsor, but I don't think it'd be a great use of time for e.g. a GSoC
> student.

To be clear, I am not working on these patches on behalf of a commercial
sponsor, but because it didn't feel right to me to package the library
with significant functionality missing, especially not in the long term.

Maxime Devos <[email-masked]> writes:

> Well, the (original?) source (the JSON files) seems to be free software,
> but if there is no free compiler for the source (and worse, there is
> only a single compiler and it can only be used by a single entity
> (cognitect)), wouldn't that make the software, from a practical
> perspective, non-free?

It is my personal opinion that this is not a compilation, but a
translation. All this "compiler" is doing, as far as I can tell, is
reading the JSON source, and outputting an equivalent source in EDN
format. This seems completely fine to me, as nothing then prevents the
user of this library from editing the EDN source, which is equivalent to
the JSON source. In fact, since this is a Clojure library, the EDN
source is probably the preferred form for editing for people who are
likely to use it.

> gnu.org words this in more detail at
> <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/when-free-depends-on-nonfree.html>.

This seems to focus on instances when some important software freedom is
lost. I can't see anything that would give guidance on what to do when
all freedoms are preserved, as they seem to be here.

-- 
Reily Siegel