[php-maint] ITP: php-recaptcha -- PHP interface to recaptcha.net

[Thomas Goirand]

Hi Mark, and thanks for your quick reply,

Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> Thomas Goirand <thomas at goirand.fr> writes:
> 
> These captchas are different than just generic captchas, though:
> 
>     reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books,
>     newspapers and old time radio shows. Check out our paper in Science
>     about it <http://recaptcha.net/reCAPTCHA_Science.pdf>
>     …
>     Currently, we are helping to digitize old editions of the New York
>     Times.

And why should we care about this? How does this changes the freeness of
php-recaptcha in the therms of my reasoning?

The following paragraph has nothing to do with what I wrote, but I just
have few things in mind I'd like to share, as it might help you to
understand what I have in mind.

It's not said in what you quoted what they will do with the digitized
documents, I doubt they would give it back to the people giving their
time to help this work, or give it for free to anyone. Does
recaptcha.net represent an association, or a foundation, with clearly
established goal, and freeness in mind? You and I have no clue of this.
And by the way, The New York Times, last time I checked, is owned by its
shareholders: it's a commercial entity. And to just make it 100% clear,
so we close the recaptcha.net website goal topic: this is absolutely NOT
related to what I said. They could do whatever they like with the
digitized work, in fact, they would still own recaptcha.net and be able
to do whatever change they want to the therms of service and make it a
service you'd have to pay for, or even close it altogether if they feel
like it, or even [paste whatever non-free issue you like here], and
you'd have no power to influence any of this kind of decision (and
neither would anyone at Debian).

Please read point 9 of this document:

http://people.debian.org/~bap/dfsg-faq.html

Because we don't have the source code of the captcha system itself (you
only have access to the source code of something that accesses the
online service), php-recaptcha fails all of the 3 tests when we want to
use it, which is a good indication that it shouldn't be considered free.

> Additionally, this is part of the dependencies for CiviCRM:

I have no doubts that CiviCRM must be very good, free and all. But this
must NOT influence Debian's view on the freeness of one of its
dependencies. A software is as free as its least free dependency, which
is why we have the contrib repository.

As I see it, php-recaptcha should be sent to non-free (which means
anything depending on it would go in contrib). I'd be happy to see
others expressing themselves here, in order to make sure I don't hold an
extreme view on this.

> I'm in the process of packaging CiviCRM for Debian.

Which is a great idea, thank you for this work/intention, but is
unrelated to my point.

> I don't see a problem with providing access to reCAPTCHA for those who
> want to help the Carnegie Mellon project as long as other CAPTCHA
> modules are available.

Please respond to my specific points about the freeness, and stay on
topic, otherwise the discussion will loop and we are all loosing time.
For the moment, the issue is php-recaptcha, not whoever depends on it.

If at the end I was right that php-recaptcha was non-free, you should
make it so that CiviCRM doesn't REQUIRES php-recaptcha, if you feel like
it set php-recaptcha as a Suggest: (and not a Depends:), make it so
php-recaptcha is uploaded to non-free, have other modules of CiviCRM be
activated by default, and everyone is happy.

Thomas