Re: Honesty in Debian (was Re: Amendment to GR on GFDL, and the changes to the Social Contract
On Mon, 13 Feb 2006, Sven Luther wrote:
> > Fonts or documentations are not softwares, for god's sake!
> everything that is not hardware is software
So a cat is a software, or a hardware ? Do I have to provide the sources
(the DNA full sequence) if I want to give a kitten to someone, following
the "free" spirit ? :p
> all the rest is excuses and play with words.
My opinion is that my holiday pictures aren't neither hardware nor
software.
> Indeed, but they should know (and we should tell them), that the hardware they
> are buying is not free-software friendly
Err, I think the problem is that most users *do not care*. They just want
their card to *work*.
I think this more productive to make their card work, AND then tell them
"this card is working with a non-free piece of thing, meaning that you may
have problems in the future in case of bugs or after upgrading your
system. please ask the manufacturer to do something about it"
> so that they have a chance to vote
> with their wallet and chose those companies who are friendly to free software
You mean Mandriva ?
> when buying hardware, so hiddenly putting non-free software in main, is
I was talking about firmwares, that is, opaque piece of bits aimed to be
run on an external, exmbedded system, part of the hartdware.
> counterproductive, while putting it in non-free, and making its use easy if
> the user wants to, is the right way out of this, and the more (if not only)
> honest way of dealing with this issue.
In this case, yes, the solution might be to create a "non-free-data"
*distributed* and available in standard.
> So, you believe that documentation is hardware, well, this is a sensible
No more software or hardware than a cat. The world is not binary.
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