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



On Mon, May 03, 1999 at 10:14:28PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > I'm not saying ICQ or AIM are quite as complicated as X, but I am saying
> > that feasibility in principle is a far cry from feasibility in practice.
> > This is why I am concerned about risk of enslavement to "practically
> > proprietary" protocols, especially when proprietary interests try to lure
> > you into it by distributing the client side as widely and freely as
> > possible, but keeping the server under lock and key.
> 
> When you have a client under GPL, you have documentation for the
> protocol in terms of source code, and you should have all you need to
> write something to communicate with it from the other end.

Not necessarily a complete one.  Are you telling me you could deduce the
entire X protocol definition document by looking at one client?

-- 
G. Branden Robinson              |    To stay young requires unceasing
Debian GNU/Linux                 |    cultivation of the ability to unlearn
branden@ecn.purdue.edu           |    old falsehoods.
cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |    -- Robert Heinlein

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