Hamish Moffatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sat, Dec 25, 2004 at 04:08:38PM -0500, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: >> Hamish Moffatt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> > Eh? The contents of EEPROMs are software just as much as the contents of >> > CD-ROMs and hard disks. They are just different media for storing >> > digital information. >> > >> You can get software out of an firmware-EEPROM on a hardware device. >> I don't think it's appropriate to call that software as is, or in >> general. This line *could* be drawn in lots of places, but if you say >> that the contents of an EEPROM are software, then how about a one-shot >> PROM? How about a book with a print-out of the source code? >> >> The only reasonable place to draw the line, for Debian, is this: can >> Debian physically ship it in a useful way? For files on disk, the >> answer is yes. We are constrained only by the license. For the book >> or the PROM, the answer is no. For an EEPROM, in general, the answer >> is no. For any such correctly operating device, the firmware is >> already there. Debian can't usefully ship it. It would be >> interesting to try supporting an architecture to run on those devices >> instead of Wind River or whatever, but there isn't one now. > > I think you have an interesting definition but I wish that we could find > a word other than "software" for it. We have overloaded that word too > much already. Originally it meant computer programs; then it meant > anything that isn't hardware. Now you're proposing that it is "anything > that Debian could distribute."
It never meant "anything that isn't hardware". For example, the movie "Star Wars" is not software. It's a movie. Some encoding of it may be software, but the film on which it was originally shot certainly isn't -- it's analog data, not digital. The definition, for Debian's purposes, has always been the recursive (but not circular) "anything that Debian can reasonably distribute". "Reasonably" is a bit of a weasel, but I think that's a useful thing to have. It's not meant to be an absolute definition, mechanically interpreted. > I think there are parallels with other software in Debian where we have > not been so forgiving. We have a number of emulators for game consoles > that are packaged and currently living in contrib eg uae, atari800. > Those are generally placed in contrib because there's currently no free > replacement for the ROMs they require. That seems comparable to Perl or any other interpreter: to be shipped in Free, at least one free program must exist. If such exist for the Atari 800 or whatever UAE emulates, then surely they can be moved to free. > There's an abstraction barrier there too: the hardware/software > interface. As we don't have any free software, the hardware (emulator) > can't be in "main". You can't use the emulator software without > additional components from outside of Debian. > > So you say that the ICQ client depends on components from outside of > Debian that are not necessarily software. Well, what if a user has > a CD-ROM (or an EEPROM?) full of ROMs for use with atari800; shouldn't > atari800 be in main then since many ICQ clients are? Such a CD-ROM is useful only by extracting software from it. This is very different from a typical hardware device, which is there for functionality. Sure, you could look at CDs or ROM chips as hardware, but they are methods of software transport. A video card is not, typically, such a method. -Brian -- Brian Sniffen [EMAIL PROTECTED]
