F-DroidCompliance » History » Version 1
Kurtis Hanna, 04/04/2020 11:36 PM
initial write-up
| 1 | 1 | Kurtis Hanna | h1. FDroidCompliance |
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| 3 | F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android based operating systems. It is similar to the Google Play store. |
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| 5 | Replicant has depended very heavily on F-Droid for a long time now. End users expect app "stores" on their smart phones. |
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| 7 | Unfortunately, F-Droid is not currently compliant with the FSF's Free Software Distribution Guidelines, which required Replicant to remove F-Droid from its upcoming 6.0 0004 release so that Replicant can continue to be FSDG compliant. |
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| 9 | Much discussion has already been had within Replicant and between Replicant and F-Droid about how F-Droid can be modified in order to make it FSDG compliant so that it can be included again in Replicant in future releases. |
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| 11 | F-Droid's build server has not purely free from proprietary blobs for a while now: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/-/issues/383 |
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| 13 | It is important for F-Droid to be built using free tools. |
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| 15 | Android has a decentralized app building process. This can be a very positive thing, fostering a much more diverse and playful ecosystem than app stores that Google and Apple provide on their smartphones's OSes. |
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| 17 | Due to the freedom issues in the F-Droid build system though, a threat exists to user privacy and security. |
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| 19 | One of these freedom issues is the fact that far too many pre-builds exist. |
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| 21 | Replicant wants an app distribution system that runs a free toolchain so that users can rely on a fully free ecosystem. |
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| 23 | One way of achieving this might be to utilize beuc's rebuilds: https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/ |
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| 25 | Replicant wants to write environment setup bash scripts to build FDroid with beuc's version of the SDK in order to be able to provide a reproducible build environment that others can test. |
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| 27 | Another freedom issue with F-Droid is that F-Droid includes apps with anti-features that are not compatible with the GNU FSDG. These apps are available alongside apps that are compatible and they are only marked with these anti-features. See #1629 for development efforts and further information on this topic. https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/FDroid |