Why is "pose" in contrib? (was firmware flamewar)
Quoting Hamish:
> is in contrib. Pose (Palm OS emulator) is in contrib. simh
...
> So most of these seem to be outside of main, because you need
> non-free ROMs. x48 does not seem to belong in main since there
> are no free ROMs for it (actually, no freely available ROMs
> at all).
The palm pilot has a fairly advanced motorola CPU onboard. Some
(university?) people have ported the Linux kernel to it... Although I
can't speak for the porters, I assume they are aiming at embedded projects.
It's hard to buy any kind of embedded CPU board for $150 that has onboard
IR, megs and megs of ram, RS-232, a graphical LCD, and can be bought at the
local computer store. The kernel is freely available, although noone has
packaged it. For $150 you'd be lucky to get a 16K PIC programmer... This
ported kernel has been all over slashdot in the past..
Anyway, it seems pose could run that port of the Linux kernel, although I
haven't tried that. Per /usr/doc/copyright, pose is GPL.
Therefore, the pose emulator running the Linux kernel meets the DFSG,
therefore pose should be in main.
Or is it in "contrib" because noone has packaged the linux kernel for the
palm pilot yet?
I think the same logic occurs with the x48. There are no "publically
available" roms for it, although I have a nice book explaining how to
program the CPU inside the calculator in assembly... Although I'm not sure
how good of a debugger x48 would be, it should be possible to legally use
x48.
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