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I am not sure we should add privacy protection to software license.

Debian Free software guideline does not allow discriminate against using debian for evil.




Oh, I definitely agree, I'm just trying to point out that a lot of people here are making assumptions about what "Free Software" means that literally nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals.


> nobody in the FOSS or Open Source movements have ever said were goals

Citation needed. RMS, the FSF and many other orgs made public statements around privacy many times.


I think you're the one who needs to provide a citation, because I've read a lot of the literature on the FSF's website and not once does privacy come up.

Now, I can't exhaustively prove a negative, but I think I can easily demonstrate that the FSF has never meaningfully expressed an opinion on privacy. Go to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html, open every single page it links to in the body of the text, and search for the word "privacy". It does not show up in the body text of any of those documents. It shows up once in a footnote that mentions a change that Samsung made had that "caused privacy concerns".

The closest they get to even mentioning the concept of privacy is when they talk about the right to modify software and use those modifications "privately", which clearly does not mean anything about user privacy.

If privacy were so big of a concern for the FSF, you'd think they'd talk about it in their official documentation on their philosophy, or put something about it in the ONE tool they have to have power over anyone: the GPL.


This is plain false. Debian routinely disables trackers and homecalling functions in the packaged software and even in the documentation.


I think you misunderstand. Debian doesn't have restrictions on how end users use their software. They do however make an effort to ensure the software they distribute is high-quality and doesn't do bad things to the user.


Indeed, if you want to help fix privacy issues in Debian, please check out our wiki page:

https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues




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