Re: Proposal: Keep non-free
On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 01:04:57AM +0100, Eduard Bloch wrote:
> #include <hallo.h>
> * MJ Ray [Sun, Mar 07 2004, 11:44:16PM]:
>
> > >hardware manufacturers (in the last instance) only. Do you think that
> > >they produce everything built in their devices?
> >
> > Do you really think that hardware manufacturers don't decide what to
> > build into their devices?
>
> Of course they do, but they have different primary goals, eg. produce
> the hardware product in this century, make it good enough to sell enough
> of it. Or do you prefer hardware that is 10 times slower or incompatible
> to what 95% of the market uses, beeing 200% more expensive?
Eduard. The real problem is the hardware manufacturers. The rest of the
non-free stuff, we can write replacement for easily enough, but there is
not yet a free software culture in the hardware or bios world, they
would like to profit from the free software current, but don't want to
give anything in return. As long as Linus do accept binary only driver
modules this will not change, as some would argue that binary only
drivers are a breach of the GPL.
Furthermore, binary only drivers are a threat to the diversity of
architectures that is one of the strength of debian, and entraps us in
the Intel monopoly structure.
Speak of IP is misplaced, would you not have hold the same discourse
about software 10, 20 years ago ?
And i don't see debian prominent in the free bios projects, nor taking
an active role in the lobbying for free hardware.
The rest of the stuff, just get ride of it, no problem we can replace
it, the things i will most miss is probably a whole bunch of non-free
documentation, and the lha unencoder, but i guess that if this later one
really cause problems for me, i would go and reimplement it. I prefer
working on debian-installer support though.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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