Miles Fidelman <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net> writes: > Getting past all the obfuscatory count and counterpoint, there seem to > be two clear questions on the table:
> 1. Given a piece of FOSS client software, that has no purpose other > than to interface with a proprietary back-end service (say a FOSS > twitter GUI), should that be considered "free software" for the purposes > of placement in main vs. contrib vs. non-free? (Or alternatively, where > should it reside?) > 2. Given a piece of FOSS client software that interfaces to, among > other things, a proprietary back-end service (e.g., a multi-protocol > chat interface that includes AIM and MS Messenger among the back-ends it > supports), be placed in contrib or non-free, simply because its > description mentions those services? The point that I think may not yet be clear enough is that if the answer to 2 is that such software should not be moved to contrib (as has historically always been the case), the answer to 1 *also* has to be that the software is not moved to contrib. Because the way you get software of type 2 is that it uses a variety of libraries of type 1, so if those libraries are moved to contrib, the main software of type 2 would also have to be moved to contrib. Writing a library specifically to interact with a non-free service is *good software engineering* (do one thing and do it well), and the correct way to implement software of type 2. So unless you want to see all software of type 2 kicked out of Debian, at least libraries of type 1 also need to be allowed in Debian. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>