98648422e8
Signal ships the Apple emoji set without a licence via an npm package and upstream does not seem terribly interested in fixing this; see: * <https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/5862> * <https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/signal-is-likely-violating-apple-license-terms-by-using-apple-emoji-in-the-sticker-creator-and-android-and-desktop-apps/52883> I don’t want to mark Signal as `lib.licenses.unfree`, so this change instead replaces the bundled Apple emoji PNGs with ones generated from our freely‐licensed Noto Color Emoji font. I chose Noto Color Emoji because it is the best‐maintained FOSS emoji font, and because Signal Android will also use the Noto emoji if the “Chats → Keyboard → Use system emoji” setting is turned on. Therefore, Noto Color Emoji is both within the bounds of the Signal user experience on other platforms, and more likely to match the emoji font installed on a NixOS system to boot. I have verified that Noto Color Emoji covers all the standalone emoji that the bundled Apple set does, and could not find any emoji sequence that reliably displayed correctly in Signal before these changes but did not afterwards. (Though I sure did find a good number of emoji that displayed weirdly in Signal both before and after.) Signal will also download and cache large versions of the Apple emoji from their own update server at runtime. This does not pose a copyright concern for the Nixpkgs cache, but would result in inconsistent presentation between small and large emoji. Therefore, we also point these to our Noto Color Emoji PNGs, and gain a little privacy in the process. **No invasive patches are made to the Signal code;** the only changes are to replace the unlicensed Apple emoji files with our own, and replace the URL that large versions are fetched from to point to them. There is no functional change to the application other than showing different images on the client and not requesting the jumbomoji pack files from the Signal update server. Ideally we’d build this package from source and simply omit the problematic files in the first place, but apparently that’s a little tricky and we should solve the compliance problem now. The best solution, of course, would be for Signal to replace their unlicensed copy of Apple’s emoji with a freely‐licensed set compatible with their AGPLv3 licence. I may try and raise this situation again with Signal, although given the past response I am not optimistic, but I wanted to first address the potential copyright violation in Nixpkgs as swiftly as possible. Although the Python script used to copy and rename the Noto PNGs is very simple, I have extensively documented it to help increase confidence in it and ease further maintenance. To reflect my willingness to keep this change maintained and take responsibility for it, I have added myself to the package maintainer list. These changes actually result in the uncompressed size of the resulting package decreasing from 450 MiB to 435 MiB; as Signal would ordinarily download and cache up to 27 MiB of jumbomoji sheets from their servers during use, the effective disk space savings are likely to be higher. Thanks to @mjm for helping test this. |
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Nixpkgs is a collection of over 100,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution.
Manuals
- NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
- Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
- Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools
Community
- Discourse Forum
- Matrix Chat
- NixOS Weekly
- Official wiki
- Community-maintained list of ways to get in touch (Discord, Telegram, IRC, etc.)
Other Project Repositories
The sources of all official Nix-related projects are in the NixOS organization on GitHub. Here are some of the main ones:
- Nix - the purely functional package manager
- NixOps - the tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines
- nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware
- Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community
- NixOS homepage - the NixOS.org website
- hydra - our continuous integration system
- NixOS Artwork - NixOS artwork
Continuous Integration and Distribution
Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra.
- Continuous package builds for unstable/master
- Continuous package builds for the NixOS 24.05 release
- Tests for unstable/master
- Tests for the NixOS 24.05 release
Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.
Contributing
Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem a lot at first, it helps consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.
Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.
For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page.
Donations
The infrastructure for NixOS and related projects is maintained by a nonprofit organization, the NixOS Foundation. To ensure the continuity and expansion of the NixOS infrastructure, we are looking for donations to our organization.
You can donate to the NixOS foundation through SEPA bank transfers or by using Open Collective:
License
Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
Note: MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.