Re: LCC and blobs
On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 03:09:52PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Hamish Moffatt dijo [Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 04:26:26PM +1100]:
> > Yet the ICQ client is not useful without a component which is not in
> > Debian and in fact is not freely available.
> >
> > If the emulators were extended to be able to fetch some basic ROM images
> > off the internet by themselves (eg via HTTP), could they go in main?
>
> The blobs for the in-kernel drivers are not to be executed by the host
> CPU itself, neither is the non-free ICQ, MSN or Yahoo servers
> (although Gaim can be seen useful by itself as it works with IRC and
> Jabber... Well, brain, please don't hijack my message ;-) ). They will
> be run on the other side of the abstraction (call it bus or
> network). The ROM for an Amiga, Atari or similar machine _does_ get
> used directly by your PC's CPU.
Who cares which CPU is executing the code? That's a non-issue. If I
have an SMP system, can I circumvent the spirit of the SC/DFSG by claiming
that one CPU is primary, running Debian, and the second CPU is a secondary
slave CPU, running a lot of non-free stuff--allowing me to have any non-
free dependencies in main that I want? Of course not--and the same thing
doesn't work if the secondary CPU is on a sound card's DSP or a SCSI card's
processor. The CPU being used isn't an important metric here (even if
it's not obvious what the real metric is).
--
Glenn Maynard
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