#57: Seeking Council feedback/input on draft third party software policy -------------------------+--------------------- Reporter: pfrields | Owner: Status: new | Priority: normal Component: General | Resolution: Keywords: workstation | -------------------------+---------------------
Comment (by jwboyer):
Replying to [comment:28 aday]:
Replying to [comment:25 mattdm]:
I'm generally unconvinced by the idea of prioritising apps in
search results based on whether they are free or not. In terms of the Software app, I doubt very much that the position of an app in the
[...]
Right now, I count 11 results for "web browser" in Software. Not
all of them are "good" results.
Right, you only get 2 or 3 actual browsers. The order of these isn't
going to make any difference to how the user perceives the options.
Really? To me at least, ordering matters quite a lot. There's a reason
people want to be the top hit on Google, etc.
I'm largely thinking about cases where there is some familiarity with
the applications on offer, which is somewhat different from the generic search engine case. That said I see the point about search results ordering having an impact. At the same time I would still argue against the necessity of tweaking search results in this way, since we'd be adding extra logic for a case that will be fairly infrequent. Do we really want to spend developer time on tweaking what happens when someone searches for "web browser"?
It seems this could be done generically based on the tags in the metadata. If something is tagged with "non-free" or "proprietary", you sort it after things that aren't. It avoids very specific case by case implementations.
Previously, I gave an example ''"Other results appear in the
[nonfree] tag, which is
We can work on the specific design - I don't think we need to figure out
the exact solution here. My point was that the proposed policy specified a UI which wasn't practical. It would be preferable if you didn't specify the exact UI to be used, so we can figure out the best solution - those of us who work on the software are in a better position to do that. Again, my suggestion for the policy would be something simple and abstract:
"Non-free software must be explicitly enabled by a user before it is
made visible in any UI."
You could add an additional clause like:
"However, the availability of non-free software options can be
advertised prior to its enablement, provided that specific details about that software are not displayed."
I actually think that additional clause is counter to what Matt is aiming for. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding. Why would we advertise e.g. Chrome as available but having no details without the user explicitly opting in to non-free software?