Re: Whether remotely running software is considered "software" for Debian.

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] "Dr. Bas Wijnen" 

> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 11:16:36AM +0200, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
> > python-digitalocean, ruby-azure*, waagent, twittering-mode,
> > probably HBCI clients, python3-googleapi,
> > python3-pyicloud, python-yowsup, youtube-dl,
> > libgfbgraph-0.2-dev
> 
> Thank you for this list.  I removed servers that cannot run on a general
> purpose system, because for obvious reasons they cannot be included in main
> even if they were free software.

Then you shouldn't remove usbmuxd for instance.  iOS devices are general
purpose computing devices, they just run another OS, and there's nothing
stopping somebody from implementing the same interfaces using free
software and, say, the Linux USB APIs.

I'm not sure what OS modern HP printers run, but I would also not be
surprised if they run a pretty straightforward Linux.  Somebody could
implement the APIs and produce, say, PDFs, or print using a hand-built
printer.  For the first case, you could easily run that on a general
purpose system.

You say that the requirement for an implementation to be useful is
orthogonal to whether it's suitable for main.  Does that also hold with
s/useful/functional/?

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are