Group:Software/research/DistributingSoftware

Introduction

Some activities or strategies either requires wide adoption to work, or require to have ways for users to use specific free software applications regardless of the operating systems or platforms they use.

For instance if lot of people produce documents in formats that are either undocumented and/or legally risky to use and/or not already implemented (well) in free software, then free software is at a disadvantage. To fix that we'd need wide addoption of standard formats like OpenDocument. But for that adoption to happen, users also need to be able to run software like Libreoffice on their computer without necessarily switching to GNU/Linux.

This article is meant to summarize the status of porting and distributing software on other platforms, from the point of view of users of FSF certified distributions.

Platforms

Android

One of the big issues with Android is that a lot of applications depend on the nonfree Google SDK.

However it is still possible to build pure Java applications for Android 6.0 or later with PureOS. Replicant also has an SDK for Android 4.2 or later that can also build native applications (like emacs that are written in C).

Users can then install applications through various way:

• with the 'adb install path/to/application.apk' command
• By downloading an apk package with a browser and running it

However this has downsides as gpg signatures are not verified, and it's more work to keep applications installed in this way up to date.

It is also possible to get your application packaged by F-Droid but the F-Droid repositories are not compliant with the free system distribution guidelines (FSDG). In addition most of the applications in the F-Droid repositories depend on the nonfree Google SDKs.

A way to help here would be to build and distributions 100% free software SDKs and to make an FSDG compliant F-Droid repository (and ship a modified F-Droid with only that repository available).

More details is available on the SDK page of the Replicant wiki.

BSD

We currently don't have any BSD FSDG compliant distribution, though Hyperbola is working on something like that

Warning: some GNU/Linux distributions recommend installing the non-free Microsoft fonts when installing Wine through a package manager. To fix this, you can install it with the apt-get install --no-install-recommends wine command.