F14: what to do about pino / twitter

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:37:11 -0700, you wrote:

>On Fri, 2010-10-01 at 20:51 -0400, Jon Stanley wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 1, 2010 at 8:36 PM,  <herrmann at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > How would you define a "proprietary web service"?
>> >
>> > Is google such a service ? The only open protocol used by connecting any app to any of their servers is http, xmpp etc. Everything behind is closed. So we remove firefox ?
>> 
>> Exactly. We've been down this road. Anything which can view arbitrary
>> content can be used to interact with proprietary services. Do we not
>> ship the Exchange support for Evolution? Do we not include f-spot (I
>> realize it's not in the default spin) because it's able to export to
>> Flickr (Shotwell can too, BTW)? Where does it stop?
>
>Those aren't the same thing. When it comes to a twitter client we're not
>talking about 'arbitrary content', we're talking about an app whose sole
>purpose is to provide *specific* content to a *specific* service. If
>pino is neutral between twitter and identi.ca by default, as someone
>suggested, then I think it's clearly fine.

So, to explore this line in the sand further, are we saying for a user
of Fedora:

1) it is okay to use twitter via a web browser (Firefox, Epiphany,
etc.)

2) it is not okay to use twitter via a dedicated client like Pino?

How exactly is this going to help the goal of freedom?

If anything this kind of arbitrary banning could end up hurting
freedom by encouraging people trying Fedora to instead either just go
back to an entirely proprietary system, or go with another
distribution that doesn't care about freedom as much.