Inclusion of app with non-free bundled asset (HTML content)?

Apps
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Hi, I’m seeking clarification on whether our app qualifies for the official F-Droid repository. I suspect it might not but I’d like to be sure about the boundaries

Setup:

  • The Code: Fully FLOSS (Libre license to be decided, e.g., GPLv3 or MIT). It’s a Capacitor-based PWA wrapper

  • The Content: The app displays educational content which is proprietary (all rights reserved) by my collaborator

  • The Packaging: To keep things separate, the content is stored in a standalone HTML file within the app’s assets

Question: Does the inclusion of this one non-free asset (the content) disqualify the entire app, even if the “engine” is free?

Follow-up: If the app is disqualified in this setup, is there any way to make it qualify (except to free/liberate the content file)?

Grateful for help with this!

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So this is an app, right? Not just a wrapper for a page on the internet, right? If I install it without Internet it still can be used?

We have a NonFreeAssets antifeature…

1 Like
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Thank you for the reply,
it’s a PWA app which i’m now working on wrapping into an APK (using Capacitor). I believe it could be used without internet access yes, we use a service worker which caches all the relevant files

Okay, so you think it qualifies but that we need to mention that the html-file-content is an anti-feature? “Non-Free Assets - non-libre media in things that are not code (e.g. images, sound, music, 3D-models, or video” Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

(The reason i thought maybe we didn’t qualify is because the content itself of the app is non-free, rather than media assets like graphics)

Project repo: DWEP App / dwep-app.gitlab.io · GitLab

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I guess what it boils down to is whether the “non-free assets anti-feature” apply to the app’s core content (and not just things like graphical and other assets)

@Licaon_Kter What’s your take on this, do you think our app would qualify?

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@linsui thoughts?

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A wrapper of non-free content is not good for me. I thought we should add a rule to the inclusion policy that for app with non free assest the main function of the app should be FOSS.

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@linsui Hi, and thank you for the response. I wasn’t clear but it’s not a wrapper, it’s more like everything except the content of the app is free software. I (as the programmer) has placed the content inside a separate html-file. The rest of the app (javascript, other html files, etc) is free software. Please ask if i can provide more info. And thank you again for helping!

Update: When i said wrapper in the original post i was thinking of the technical aspect of wrapping the PWA inside of a native Android app

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If you like you can have a look at the app here https://dwep-app.gitlab.io/

After skipping through the onboarding dialog you can see that each of the practices has a title and text which is available and looks like in this image

image
image1065×1211 272 KB

This content is proprietary, but not the code or anything else in the app

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Reuse, modification, or redistribution is not permitted without explicit permission from the author.

NonFreeAsset is for assets allowing redistribution. If redistribution is not allowed we can’t distribute it.

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That makes a lot of sense! I didn’t consider this. I may talk to my friend and ask him if he could change this. In any case, thank you for the help