Re: Dependence on nonfree software

[Ian Kelling]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>     > The package must not refer the user to any nonfree software; in
>     > other words, it must not say anything that in our judgment is likely
>     > to lead or steer users towards running or installing nonfree
>     > software on their machine.
>
> That is a good formulation.  (It should say "their own machines".)
> But I agree an example would help make it clead.
>
> Suppose you write a free program that can run in a free GNU/Linux
> distro and talks with Google Maps.  With it, people can use Google Maps
> and not run any nonfree JS code.  Use of this free program depends on
> the use of the site, Google Maps, but it does not depend on _your_
> running any nonfree program.  So it is ok on this criterion.

There is probably a better example out there. This is a bit long, but
bear with me. Most people nowadays use google maps on their phones in an
application that is written in java for android or objective c or swift
for ios. And one of the primary use cases is to generate a route from
their location to somewhere. If the user has an internet connection,
that generation is done on the server and is SaaSS (reference,
https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/directions )
There is worse quality route generation feature done by the program when
an internet connection is not available, but it regularly fails to find
a route, telling the user it needs an internet connection, and even when
it does get a route, it regularly notifies the user that they can get
better directions by connecting to the internet. On the other hand,
there is a pretty good free software maping program for android called
maps.me that uses openstreetmap data. It does it's route generation in
the program. I've found one of the main features where it is not as good
as google maps is in that route generation. So, nowadays, if you say
"google maps", it means the route generation done on google servers just
as much as it means the map data that the client downloads and would be
fine if we had a free client. An example like yours could give someone
the idea that it would be a good idea to add a feature to maps.me to do
a network call to google maps in order to generate a better route. That
would be a bad idea.

- Ian