#include <hallo.h> * Joe Wreschnig [Mon, May 31 2004, 11:32:02PM]: > > I fully agree with you on that and you've given very worthy examples of > > applications that replace the non-free ones. But note one thing - NONE of > > their authors came moaning that "acrobat is bad, it has to be removed, guys, > > remove it" - but they sat down and wrote the software. And what I was > > talking about were people who go talking about something being wrong, about > > politics, theoritizing and pointing fingers but doing nothing in order to > > change anything. If somebody comes and says "the tg driver is bad, because > > it is non free and I will remove it" and offers no alternative then, in my > > book, that person loses _all_ the credibility as a software developer and > > a person that can be trusted to do some task which requires responsibility. > > So, if no free alternative exists, any proprietary program (whether we > have a legal right to distribute or not) can be in Debian if someone > packages it. (Don't respond with "I'm not saying that", because you > are.) Correct. That is why we have non-free as part of "distributable Debian". // Note for the fanatics: it's "not part of Debian" as "Debian = Debian main" And I fully agree with Marek, especially since nobody did convince me that the embedded firmware chunks are not free-as-source. There are extreme cases where the distribution conditions were violating the GPL (IIRC Keyspan firmware) but this have been resolved in pre-woody times. > No, really, what the fuck are you smoking? Did you lose your place on > the road to SuSE or something? Debian consists *only free software* > whether or not some non-free program exists that can do something novel. What t.f. do you smoking? You deliberate work against our good old social contract regardless of the consequences. Mr. Palmer has been told where he was wrong and he failed to provide good proof for his claims. You seem to follow his way and cut arguments to loony claims. Maybe you should leave Debian and start the "Extremely Free Debian" project. > (P.S. I have, with various people, freely reimplemented two entire > (music, graphics, code) proprietary games because I want to avoid > non-free software. So, don't lecture me about sitting down and coding.) Dude, we don't talk about drivers (IMHO in many cases they are not that hard to be developed if you did not sleep in the Protocol Engineering courses). We talk about firmware that runs inside of the device. Regards, Eduard. -- Es gibt wirklich viele Menschen die bloß lesen, damit sie nicht zu denken brauchen. -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
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