Re: GStreamer xwidget

[Dmitry Gutov]

This whole thread is very puzzling.

On 27.11.2021 07:09, Richard Stallman wrote:
>    > > We would have to trust them to place only free plugins in
>    > > `gst-plugins-good' and `gst-plugins-base', and to document the plugins
>    > > correctly.
>
>    > Wait, it’s not needed to trust anyone.  There aren’t millions of plugins,
>    > maximum hundreds: it would be perfectly feasible to include the list of
>    > all of them into emacs.  The question is whether to*delegate*  that work
>    > to GNOME, and the issue would then be when that list changes, what about
>    > updates, etc.
>
> Please state concretely what it is that you're disagreeing about.
> Instead of arguing about whether to "trust GNOME", please tell
> us what exactly the GStreamer developers did.  Then we can  see
> whether that solves the problem.

Whatever plugins are available on the user's system, are a result of the 
distro including them (which, by default, means only the "good" ones get 
in), as well as the ones the user installed explicitly. Possibly "bad" 
too (the less well-written ones).

The "licensing problems" with "ugly" plugins are more on the side of 
"not being distributed under LGPL", rather not being free software. Or 
maybe having dependencies like that, because I wasn't able to find an 
example of the former.

More likely, they are in that category because of the video/image 
formats being patent encumbered (so the distros can't easily distribute 
that code). But if the user has installed such a plugin manually, who 
are we to deny them the pleasure of viewing asf, realmedia or whatever?

>    > Btw, why whitelisting good and base, instead of blacklisting bad and ugly?
>
> There are probably lots of nonfree plugins.  Trying to list them would
> be a lot of work, and unreliable too.

If you were designing the 'shell-command' command in Emacs today, would 
you start with a whitelist of all known free software programs and 
refuse to call anything not from that list?