Re: LCC and blobs
On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 01:54:19PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
> aren't equivalent. The issue at hand is whether somebody might ever
> download software from Debian and find it useless without additional
> software which he could download... but not from Debian, since it's
> not Free and not packaged.
I agree that this is the important part: if there's a piece that should
be distributed by Debian for some package to use, and the only reason
it's not is because it's non-free or not redistributable, and it'd
be Depended on if it was packaged, it's a dependency. It doesn't matter
which CPU that piece of data gets executed on (that's a very brittle
metric).
The idea of sticking firmware on some remote server and wgetting it is a
fairly transparent case of "ignoring and sidestepping the SC". On the
other hand, the case of AIM clients that need to handle CRC requests from
the server to "verify" themselves proxying these requests to some remote
server (to avoid having to actually access the data) doesn't intuitively
feel wrong. I'm not sure why, though.
(Maybe it's because it's a legitimate way to work around blatent copyright
abuse, so it gets more slack than blatent SC evasion; but I can't put my
finger on any tangible difference in these cases, and maybe there isn't
one.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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