Re: Visualboy Advance question.
Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 19:02, Josh Triplett wrote:
>
> > While I agree that it is not necessarily required that a Free package
> > Depend on some piece of Free data for it to operate on, I do believe
> > that if there is _no_ Free data for the package to run with, and that
> > data is required in order to operate, then the package must go in
> > contrib until at least one free piece of data is available.
>
> I just don't think that software Depends: on the data it manipulates the
> way that it Depends: on, say, libraries or other programs.
>
> It also seems terribly unhackerly. I mean, heck: if I'd like to create
> some Free Gameboy ROMs, I'd want to do it on a Free operating system.
>
> Lastly, I guess there's just something really violating about thinking
> that Debian is judging the data I have, or could have, on my hard drive.
> So I'm not working with Free data. So what? Mind your own beeswax,
> Debian.
This was all discussed to death when Quake 2 was GPL'd [1]. The main
problem I see is that if you accept these arguments, contrib becomes
empty. Whether you like it or not, there is a value judgement going
on with contrib vs. main. If something is not "useful" enough with
non-free bits, then it goes into contrib.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/12/msg01723.html
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