Glenn Maynard writes: > On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 02:42:50PM -0500, Michael Poole wrote: > > Brian Thomas Sniffen writes: > > > > > No. Firmware resident in RAM but put there by, say, the BIOS is > > > fine. We've elected not to ignore firmware which is to be handled and > > > installed by Debian software. You're having trouble making a coherent > > > position out of this only because you keep recasting it in terms which > > > aren't equivalent. The issue at hand is whether somebody might ever > > > download software from Debian and find it useless without additional > > To nitpick: "somebody might ever" is backwards. We don't care if > somebody might ever find the software useless; what we care about is > whether everybody will find it useless. Stuff goes in main as long as > somebody can use it (for some reasonable value of "use", eg. not > including Marco's contrivances that would imply the elimination of > contrib entirely).
Anyone with a copy of the firmware and the device being driven may of course "use" the driver, although I suspect you define that as unreasonable. The ambiguity of "use" is perhaps why the SC does not define free software or dependency with that term. > > > software which he could download... but not from Debian, since it's > > > not Free and not packaged. > > > > Why do you insist on the "downloadable" part of "useless without > > additional software which he could download"? I see no basis for that > > qualification in the DFSG or policy. I could manufacture a device > > Well, all software is downloadable (if not necessarily easily or > legally), so I think that word is a no-op. I think the focus, here, > is "since it's not Free and not packaged": there seems to be a violation > of SC#1 if the data should be included in the package for its basic > use, but isn't for legal/freeness reasons. The legal reason applies much more to AIM than to Debian. The freeness issues are where we disagree: I consider the firmware to be part of the (inherently non-DFSG-free) hardware; you want to treat it as related only to the driver. The ICQ server is not free and not packaged. Why does it get a pass? > > We require licenses to allow inhabitants of a desert island to > > exercise all their DFSG rights even though they live on a desert > > island. We should not accept software that becomes useless when used > > on a desert island. > > Extending the desert island test in this way isn't useful. If you're > on a desert island, an ICQ client (and a mail client, and bittorrent, and > lots of other things) isn't useful to you, even if you have a server to > connect to. The desert island test is about being able to execute > freedoms in a vacuum; let's leave it there. I cited an example (which you snipped) where an IM program is useful in such a vacuum. None of the DFSG require that the general public be able to use the software -- it is such a fundamental right that it is assumed -- but you want to leave this isolated user with software that will not work as designed. Michael Poole
