On Thu, Dec 30, 2004 at 03:09:52PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > Hamish Moffatt dijo [Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 04:26:26PM +1100]: > > Yet the ICQ client is not useful without a component which is not in > > Debian and in fact is not freely available. > > > > If the emulators were extended to be able to fetch some basic ROM images > > off the internet by themselves (eg via HTTP), could they go in main? > > The blobs for the in-kernel drivers are not to be executed by the host > CPU itself, neither is the non-free ICQ, MSN or Yahoo servers > (although Gaim can be seen useful by itself as it works with IRC and > Jabber... Well, brain, please don't hijack my message ;-) ). They will > be run on the other side of the abstraction (call it bus or > network). The ROM for an Amiga, Atari or similar machine _does_ get > used directly by your PC's CPU.
Who cares which CPU is executing the code? That's a non-issue. If I have an SMP system, can I circumvent the spirit of the SC/DFSG by claiming that one CPU is primary, running Debian, and the second CPU is a secondary slave CPU, running a lot of non-free stuff--allowing me to have any non- free dependencies in main that I want? Of course not--and the same thing doesn't work if the secondary CPU is on a sound card's DSP or a SCSI card's processor. The CPU being used isn't an important metric here (even if it's not obvious what the real metric is). -- Glenn Maynard
