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Am Samstag, 18. Februar 2006 23:08 schrieb Arthur de Jong: > On Sat, 18 Feb 2006, Josselin Mouette wrote: > > Come on, please stop arguing with random, unsuited comparisons, and use > > common sense : what's the purpose of ndiswrapper without non-free > > drivers to use it on? We've always put things of the like in contrib, > > and if we stop doing it, we can remove contrib entirely. > > The purpose of ndiswrapper is to run non-free Windows drivers on Linux. > The same is more or less true for wine and dosemu (otherwise we would > probably make a native version of said apps). An example: Inno Setup for creating self-extracting installers for win32 has a 4-clause BSD style license but needs Borland Delphi to compile. How would you make a native application (the command line utility would suffice)? I let it run with wine to create a distribution of a software for windows (using the very useful mingw32 packages). Same goes for dosemu that can run freedos. Those two do not compare to ndiswrapper. > Would the situation change (contrib-wise) if ndiswrapper were integrated > into the kernel? Would we want to split the ndiswrapper part to contrib > then? Ndiswrapper will never be integrated into the kernel. However, I see drivers in linux that need non-free parts (=firmware) to run. Do those now go to contrib? Ndiswrapper probably is better compared to such drivers than to wine or dosemu. If you have to go by some laws but want mostly firmware driven hardware, you cannot have it all open source with a free license. You wouldn't have the proper compiler anyway. Maybe Debian should take one or two steps back to the point where it only requires source for something that can actually be compiled with something in Debian. For the rest, it should only matter if it's actually distributable. And yes, this is not much related to the ndiswrapper discussion. HS |