F-DroidCompliance » History » Revision 2
Revision 1 (Kurtis Hanna, 04/04/2020 11:36 PM) → Revision 2/35 (Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli, 04/05/2020 05:31 AM)
h1. FDroidCompliance h2. Introduction F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android based operating systems. It is similar to the Google Play store. Replicant has depended very heavily on F-Droid for a long time now. End users expect app "stores" on their smart phones. 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. 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. F-Droid's build server has not purely free from proprietary blobs for a while now: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/-/issues/383 It is important for F-Droid to be built using free tools. 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. Due to the freedom issues in the F-Droid build system though, a threat exists to user privacy and security. One of these freedom issues is the fact that far too many pre-builds exist. Replicant wants an app distribution system that runs a free toolchain so that users can rely on a fully free ecosystem. One way of achieving this might be to utilize beuc's rebuilds: https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/ 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. 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 h2. Plan h3. Discuss with F-Droid to find a way to implement the FSDG compliance *Outcome*: What metadata will be ok for them. h3. Implementation |_. Task |_. Budget |_. Comments | | Build F-Droid from an FSDG compliant distribution | Hard to predict => Replicant funding | Replicant 6 can't be built with FSDG compliant distros but Replicant 4.2, 9.0 and probably 10.0 too can => We need F-Droid to be built from an FSDG compliant distributions |