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Re: Software in main that is throughly useless without non-free software



On Sun, May 02, 1999 at 12:41:14PM +0000, Edward Betts wrote:
> > > So IRC and AOL are free clients, non-free servers with no free
> > > alternatives,
> > 
> > There are free IRC servers, e.g. the ircd package in main.
> 
> Sorry, I meant ICQ not IRC.

And yet there are two attempts out there to write a free ICQ server.  The
specs are published.  Nobody has released one yet but so what?

If the protocol is published the lack of a free server AT THE MOMENT
should not penalize the software.

TIK obviously needed some information on how the AOL messaging service
works or it couldn't have been written.  The same information could be
used to write a free server at any point.


Once again I ask if a perl script that gets the latest news from
freshmeat (whose CGI scripts have not been published IIRC) is at best
contrib just because it was designed for freshmeat.

How about a GPL'd software package designed to connect you to a service
like AOL which doesn't quite use "normal" software for some of its
content?

--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org>            Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE            The Source Comes First!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
<dark> Knghtbrd: We have lots of whatevers.
<Knghtbrd> dark - In Debian?  Hell yeah we do!

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