On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 02:20:42PM +0200, Riku Voipio wrote: > On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 03:52:29AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > > On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 12:43:39PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > > What makes 'running free windows drivers for stuff' so much more > > > unrealistic than 'running free windows software for stuff'? Especially > > > seen as how no Windows software is packaged for Debian, so that our > > > users would have to do this themselves?
> > I can, personally, point to Free Software that I've run under Wine on > > Debian. I can't do the same for free drivers running under ndiswrapper, and > > I don't see that anyone else in this discussion has done so either. That > > makes the second case a hypothetical, and IMHO it seems to be a contrived > > one. > Emulators/games have been moved[1] from contrib to main after someone > has done free data files which are essentially "proof of concept" > in nature. It was not my understanding that these were proof-of-concept data files; while not necessarily as appealing as some of the non-free offerings, I was led to believe they were still worthwhile in their own right, at least to some subset of users. > I fail to see why availability of a CIPE driver for ndiswrapper doesn't > fall into the same category. Well, aside from not believing that anyone is going to use CIPE under ndiswrapper (without someone stepping forward and testifying that this is the case for them), I see a distinction between "wine is necessary in order for you to run app $foo on Debian" and "ndiswrapper is necessary in order for you to run Debian on hardware $foo". I realize this isn't a distinction that everyone agrees is relevant here, but it is the one that stands out to me, and I suspect we can at least all agree that the latter is the real reason why people care about having ndiswrapper in main -- *not* to facilitate loading free toy network drivers.... -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/
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