On 2016-03-29 09:25, Jookia wrote:
On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 09:30:40AM +0200, Jean Louis wrote:
I cannot understand the rationalization and justifications based on
the
single fact how WINE/MAME or other similar emulators are free software
by themselves, and that is the only reason to include them, but let us
avoid all the reality about that, that those platforms are being
developed for the major purpose of running non-free software. It does
not play alone. It is hypocrisy.
I think this might be my last email since they don't seem to be forming
any kind
of discussion, so I'll leave this question: Should we ship Linux-libre
with
virtualization support? From what I know there's only a handful of
systems out
there that can run it without proprietary blobs in its BIOS updates.
What about
virtualization with PCI passthrough support, primarily used for video
games?
Jean Louis
Jookia.
I guess I should say a couple things since this all came about when I
mentioned I packaged MAME
<https://notabug.org/rain1/pkgs/src/master/rain/mame.scm> for guix,
since it recently switched to GPL2.
My opinion on this is pretty simple: MAME is free software.
I don't mind if it goes into guix packages tree or not - to be honest it
doesn't seem that great an idea. The compile time is huge and the output
is a 160MB binary. That would use up resources from build farms that
could be better spent on core libraries like libc, gcrypt, openssl, ...
MAME, Wine, Qemu and GNU/linux-libre all have the following in common:
You can use them to run non free software. While they can all also be
used to run free software I don't think this is important. Here's why:
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
