[Trisquel-devel] FSDG question: extension of bleachbit patch for Trisquel

[Pablo Correa Gómez]

Dear FSF's licensing team.

	I am Pablo, and I have recently started helping in the
development of Trisquel. I am writing you because in the last
developers meeting there was a discussion about how patch the program
"Bleachbit" to remove the advocacy of non-free Software, but there
wasn't a clear agreement on how to do it based on FSDG.

	Basically, Bleachbit is a program able to remove temporary
files from different other programs. Unfortunately, it mentions and
supports some non-free programs that are not supported by Trisquel, but
that could be installed from source or from Ubuntu repositories. It can
also run in Windows.

	We have patched the program in a way that a regular user will
not be suggested non-free software while running Bleachbit, as all
references have been removed. In addition, the functionality of
Bleachbit with non-free programs that could be installed in Trisquel
has also been removed. For example, Chromium functionality has been
removed, so if someone installs it, grabbing it from Ubuntu's
repositories, Bleachbit will not be able to clean its temporary files.

	However, if some more advanced user downloads the source code
of Bleachbit found in Trisquel's repositories, it will be able to find
Windows' related files and references to non-free programs inside those
files, as well metadata of non-free programs that can only be installed
under Windows.

	The question raised in the meeting was if we should also remove
non-free references inside Windows' related files, making the patch
bigger and then increasing the maintenance overhead, or just to keep
them as they are, which means that regular users will have a program
that behaves according to FSDG.

	I hope I have made clear myself, and I'm sorry if my English is
not good enough. Please ask for any clarifications about the issue if
you believe it hasn't been properly explained.
	Please, CC your answer to trisquel-devel en listas.trisquel.info,
so everyone involved in the development can have a first hand answer to
the issue.

Best regards,
Pablo.