Matthew Garrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > The social contract uses "require", which is a stronger term than > policy's "depend". The driver software requires the portion of the > hardware that can also be described as software.
I assume the relevant quote is: "We will never make the system require the use of a non-free component." I don't think this sentence can be understood by looking at each work through a magnifying glass. You need some kind of context (beyond the text of the Social Contract) to know what was intended here, not a detailed analysis of what "require" means. For example, you could understand the sentence to mean: "We won't make the whole system dependent on a non-free component, but parts of the system might be designed to communicate with non-free software and therefore be useless without the corrresponding non-free software." Or it could mean: "We won't deliberately make the system dependent on a non-free component, but if it so happens that there is no free software that implements the other side of some protocol, then that's a problem with the rest of the world, not with Debian." I don't claim it does mean either of these things, just that the sentence in isolation could be interpreted that way.