Hi,
It's fine for software in main to be able to do stuff with non-free data; that's not the issue. The question is whether there *exists* any free data that it works with, and if not, whether that's a problem.
I don't believe that is a problem. We don't ship the non-free data, we just allow its use. I can see your point, however, that it is useless to ship an utility that cannot be used at present without having non-free data installed.
This case is similar to the Quake one, I think, but I'm not sure it is really warranted to make a separate package for a single utility just to move it into contrib. The case was clearly different IMO if core functionality was affected, but in fact we are discussing about 100 lines of code within an ISDN stack. :-)
Simon (who never thought he'd be on the "pragmatic" side)
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