Re: Bug#353277: ndiswrapper in main
On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Ian Jackson wrote:
> What, then, is the intended meaning when the policy manual talks about
> `wrappers' for non-free programs ? (Feel free to say that the wording
> is suboptimal and shouldn't be read so closely.)
Wrapper like "installation wrappers": free code that downloads a non-free
program from a website to install it on the machine (because we're not
allowed to redistribute the software directly in non-free).
> Software systems are becoming ever more complex and `vertical'
> layering is nowadays sometimes absent - sometimes you can't really say
> which piece of software is `above' or `below' (ie, which depends on
> the other).
I find the other interpretation more difficult to apply consistently.
> I don't follow the argument here at all. A library can still be
> useful even if nothing in Debian depends on it, either because some
> older Debian package still depends on it, or because a user's own
> software depends on it.
What's so different between my own non-free program and my own non-free
card which requires a non-free driver to work with ?
> > (c) free viewers/players for proprietary formats (Word documents,
> > mp3 players, etc) are okay for main
> > (d) free clients for proprietary protocols (for which there is no
> > free server) are okay for main
>
> The reason we need to have free players for proprietary formats and
> free clients for proprietary servers is because our users can't
> completely control what formats other people send them and what
> servers they are required to use.
And we need ndiswrapper because our users can't completely control the
drivers that come with the hardware they have received or been given.
Note that I don't use ndiswrapper and I hope I'll never have to use it and
I encourage anyone to request free drivers instead but I still don't see
what we're trying to gain by moving it to contrib.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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