Re: Visualboy Advance question.

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

Joe Wreschnig wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-06-23 at 15:30, Walter Landry wrote:
<snip>
>> 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.
> 
> Except for all the programs that depend on proprietary libraries,
Nah, users could write replacement libraries to match the interface.
> or 
> proprietary runtime environments,
Nah, users could write replacement runtime environments.

> or installer programs (though I would 
> be fine moving the last case to non-free). i.e. the stuff that Depends:
> in the Debian sense.
> 
>>  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.
See, this is really true!

> A good comparison is, why do we ship .doc readers in Debian? I'm pretty
> sure we don't distribute any .docs (someone will prove me wrong on this,
> I bet), and I can't recall seeing one under a free license that wasn't
> also available in some better form. We've come to the conclusion that
> because the .doc reader itself is free and because many of our users
> might want to open .docs (even though they are proprietary pieces of
> shit), we include the reader.
> 
> Prior to the inclusion of OpenOffice, I don't even think we had anything
> that could generate free .docs (no, AbiWord can't); I believe GCC can
> generate free Gameboy binaries.
Well, in that case, if the free emulator can operate with a binary generated
by GCC, and no other non-free data (BIOS ROMs or whatnot), then the Gameboy
emulator should be in 'main'.

-- 
There are none so blind as those who will not see.