Trisquel and Parabola are deleting Boinc from there repositories, because of it "advertise" close-source projects.

They would accept a version with only open-source projects in the project list in the GUI. Could some one make such a version, or help me with making such a version?

It could/should help both sides.

Thanks

For distribution, they would simply have to edit (cut down) the copy of all_projects_list.xml distributed with the program. That would remove the "advertisement" when the program first launches.

But BOINC itself periodically downloads a fresh copy of the list, with new projects added / old projects removed / changes to existing projects. The maintainers would have to consider whether this contravenes their principles.

Also, users can add unlisted projects simply by typing in a url. Is that acceptable?

It might be better for the repository maintainers to open a dialog with the BOINC Project Management Committee, and work through their differences to see if a compromise can be reached.

Hi Larissa,

apart from the discussion you started on the Rechenkraft.net forum, I never heard of anyone contacting the BOINC developers about this.

I would like to hear from the distributions or the maintainers what the problematic part is and then we can surely find a way how to circumvent this.

The easiest thing to do is as Richard said that the distribution distributes a cut down all_projects_list.xml and we disable the periodical download in the distribution packages. The question is then who maintains such a list and how are updates propagated to the client.

Here is some discussion of this for the Trisquel distribution: https://trisquel.info/en/issues/5658

David Anderson wrote:

If someone were to keep track of the licenses of the apps
used by BOINC projects, we could use this to make a client version that showed only projects with open-source apps.

But I think this is a silly idea and not worth doing.
To me, other attributes of projects - like whether their computational results will eventually be made publicly available - are more significant than whether the app is open source.

---

I had written to some groups/distros. Here is my message:


As some might know, trisquel (https://devel.trisquel.info/trisquel/ubuntu-purge/merge_requests/19) and parabola(https://projects.parabola.nu/blacklist.git/tree/blacklist.txt#n71) deleted Boinc from their repositories. Also the FSF have it on their List of software that does not respect the Free System Distribution Guidelines (https://groups.fsf.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines).

So I contacted Boinc for help, here is the thread: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10496#64147.
They advice, that: "It might be better for the repository maintainers to open a dialog with the BOINC Project Management Committee, and work through their differences to see if a compromise can be reached.".

So I try to connect: trisquel, parabola, fsf, fsfe, gnewsense, FSF India, FSF France. If I forgot someone please tell me.


--end of mail--

I haven´t got an answer.

Here the Forum thread over at trisquel: http://trisquel.info/de/forum/boinc-problem

I am only following the FSF guidelines and try to give them a version which is ok in there opinion.

Smarthuman is an account from me. I normally do not use it, but I was kept login apparently.

Here is an idea on how this could work. I see two concerns raised, according to the FSDG community.

1. Advertises closed-source projects: This obviously means the project list in the Manager that is maintained by the BOINC developers. A solution would be that we add a FSDG field for each project to the project list. Someone from the FSDG community has to supply this information obviously. The Manager gets made aware of this field and the package maintainer of an FSDG compliant distribution can set a compile time flag to enable the use of the FSDG field. The Manager than shows only the projects that have this FSDG flag. All other Managers ignore this flag.

The user is still able to attach to non-FDSG compliant projects which in my opinion should not be changed as it is a conscientious decision of the user to download non-FDSG software. He just has to do the license research on his own.

2. "nonfree files including and relating to api/texfont.{cpp,h} and possible other license issues": I think the api/texfont.{cpp,h} issue was resolved some time ago. There are other files that are part of the BOINC source tree but are not under LGPL but they usually are not required for the Manager or Client and can be omitted by the package maintainer. I couldn't find more specific information regarding the "possible other license issues" stated in the parabola blacklist. My guess is that this relates to older code that is not actively used to build the Client, Manager or Server parts but to give an example on how other projects solved things. I will not comb through the BOINC code and try to find such things but if someone finds a specific example, please make us aware of it so we can fix it.

In general I agree with David, that whether a project releases the results to the public or not is more important than the license of the applications. In some cases only some applications of a project are open-source and some others are not. A project can release new applications in an instant so this has to be monitored (by someone from the FSDG community) too.