frankly, the entire thing is pretty ugly. has always been.

and the involvement of guix in this mess hasn't made anything prettier. I'd be disinclined to trust that whatever guix has done here further than I can throw a chromebook.

FWIW, to pre-empt any rebuttals, i contend that this is not an issue for parabola to decide alone; so there is little point to discuss it on this bug tracker - if anyone is truly concerned about resolving this conflict, the appropriate venue to discuss it is the FSDG mailing list - i have raised this issue on that list again just recently (actually, quiliro did); and everyone is invited to voice their opinion

https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2019-10/msg00012.html

no, guix did not present their work to the work-group - they entered the conversation briefly after some people had been cross-posting to the mailing lists of guix, the FSDG, and GNU, in opposition to the decision to add chromium to guix - when asked to help the work-group to resolve the conflict with the FSDG, the guix representatives declined, and suggested that people who want to resolve the conflict, should study the guix build recipe themselves, to determine if it is FSDG-fit - thats not to mention the massive source code, which is the main reason why this was not already resolved, years before guix was interested in it

not everyone in the work-group is a programmer though; so someone would need to read and understand the build recipe and audit the entire code-base, then explain it to the group in plain words, so that everyone can make an informed decision - that is yet to happen though; and most likely never will

if the group decides it is acceptable, and most importantly, is able to convince the FSF to accept it, then it could become the standard recommendation; which would also be in plain words - if the work-group decides that it is not acceptable, then most importantly, the FSF should step in and ask all endorsed distros to remove it (again), or revoke their endorsement

i have no strong preference, aside from deferring the matter to the FSDG work-group - any of those outcomes would be fine by me; but the current situation sucks (pardon my french), and it doesnt seem likely that any of those resolutions will come to pass any time soon

This Chromium thing looks like a never ending issue. When I read this, I felt like I needed to propose a real solution:

https://lists.parabola.nu/pipermail/dev/2020-May/007788.html

I've read some issues on the Iridium tracker, and they have Google Safe Browsing enabled by default

https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/wiki/Differences-between-Iridium-and-Chromium#google-safe-browsing
https://github.com/iridium-browser/tracker/issues/131

Idk what are the exact differences between Ungoogled Chromium and Iridium, but afaik UC also has Google NSA Browsing (:P) enabled. We should evaluate which one is better in terms of freedom, and in second place in privacy. Both disable a lot of Google crap, so the leftovers like the NSA browsing may not be too difficult to remove. I read that Iridium lends some patches from UC, so my fast-conclusion-brain-CPU tells my that they are like the same, but Iridium is privacy-security focused, nothing more. None of them seem to remove all the non-free crap, just Google stuff. Plus, Iridium's wiki claims that the Google stuff is "disabled", not "removed" (or maybe it's in fact removed, idk, I'm just kind of paranoiac with Chromium)

Megver83 I can understand the wish to move this forward. but as far as I know (and I may be a bit out of the loop these days) The question of the codes freedom WRT FSDG has not yet been cleared up. This isn't just a Google/Privacy thing. It is a fundamentally a "Does that code meet the 4 freedoms as required?" issue.

If I've missed something please let me know.

Yea, you're right, that's why I said "We should evaluate which one is better in terms of freedom, and in second place in privacy", but I was talking about Iridium and UC to consider them as potential projects that could be forked to create a freed Chromium browser, and in that sense my thought is that Iridium looks like a good candidate for that, only because by forking it we can save us time from removing Google stuff

from what i remember of the most recent discussion in 2018, both the ungoogled and iridium teams were asked if they made any changes WRT licensing issues; and they both said "no" - AFAICT, they only address privacy concerns; so the licensing audit "elephant in the room" is still in the room

and again (ive noted this so many times), the original upstream bug report from 2009 was never closed - that strongly suggests, that even it's own maintainers can not attest that it is properly licensed - that ought to be enough evidence for anyone to conclude that it probably is not; or that the code-base is so large that even it's maintainers do not know what is actually in it - either conclusion is sufficiently dubious to keep it on the FSDG's "ugly list"

thats about the size of it - that is where the issue was left two years ago, when the only FSDG distro which had chromium, agreed to remove it - no new information has been presented since that time - the only thing that changed, was that one distro decided to package chromium, then shortly afterward, the distro which had removed it, added it back; and both knew that it was forbidden

like it or not, the FSDG recommendation for chromium is still: "use icecat"; and unfortunately, no one, not even those who actually want this behemoth in their distro, wants to do the audit, which could change the recommendation - the FSF apparently does nothing, when distros intentionally stray from the explicit guidelines; so thats what we have folks - sadly, the FSDG trophy is not as shiny as it once was - some polishing is overdue