On Feb 21, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote: > The reason for contrib isn't practicality at all, it's to distinguish > free software that stands on its own and that depends on non-free > software. That's why it's specifically talked about in the social > contract, rather than only being discussed in policy. Indeed. I believe that in origin the main purpose of contrib was to collect applications depending on non-free libraries like Motif and XForms, to make clear to our users that while these packages were free software they needed some non-free components to work, with all the practical and moral implications which follow from this. I think that e.g. emulators like scummvm or ABI adaptation layers like WINE and ndiswrapper are in a different category because they are free software which enables us to use some non-free program with Linux, may it be an old game or the driver for a network card. If we assume that users want/need to use these non-free programs anyway then scummvm and ndiswrapper provide a benefit to users and the free software movement because while they are usually used together with non-free software they have the net effect of allowing users to use *less* non-free software.
-- ciao, Marco
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