Joe Wreschnig wrote: > On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 15:30, Walter Landry wrote: <snip> >> This was all discussed to death when Quake 2 was GPL'd [1]. The main >> problem I see is that if you accept these arguments, contrib becomes >> empty. > > Except for all the programs that depend on proprietary libraries, Nah, users could write replacement libraries to match the interface. > or > proprietary runtime environments, Nah, users could write replacement runtime environments.
> or installer programs (though I would > be fine moving the last case to non-free). i.e. the stuff that Depends: > in the Debian sense. > >> Whether you like it or not, there is a value judgement going >> on with contrib vs. main. If something is not "useful" enough with >> non-free bits, then it goes into contrib. See, this is really true! > A good comparison is, why do we ship .doc readers in Debian? I'm pretty > sure we don't distribute any .docs (someone will prove me wrong on this, > I bet), and I can't recall seeing one under a free license that wasn't > also available in some better form. We've come to the conclusion that > because the .doc reader itself is free and because many of our users > might want to open .docs (even though they are proprietary pieces of > shit), we include the reader. > > Prior to the inclusion of OpenOffice, I don't even think we had anything > that could generate free .docs (no, AbiWord can't); I believe GCC can > generate free Gameboy binaries. Well, in that case, if the free emulator can operate with a binary generated by GCC, and no other non-free data (BIOS ROMs or whatnot), then the Gameboy emulator should be in 'main'. -- There are none so blind as those who will not see.
