On 22 Feb 2006, Steve Langasek verbalised:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 12:43:39PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 03:33:19PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 09:11:50PM -0800, Adam McKenna wrote:
>>>> The reality is that we can't imagine all the uses our users might
>>>> have for this software,
>
>>> You don't have to imagine all the uses, just the realistic ones,
>>> which in this case is simply "running non-free Windows drivers for
>>> stuff".
>
>> What makes 'running free windows drivers for stuff' so much more
>> unrealistic than 'running free windows software for stuff'?
>> Especially seen as how no Windows software is packaged for Debian,
>> so that our users would have to do this themselves?
>
> I can, personally, point to Free Software that I've run under Wine
> on Debian. I can't do the same for free drivers running under
> ndiswrapper, and I don't see that anyone else in this discussion has
> done so either. That makes the second case a hypothetical, and IMHO
> it seems to be a contrived one.
To me it seems odd that the freedom of a work can be deterined
by whether or not there are thirs party works licensed appropriately
or not. So I am coming down on the side of treating emulatrs and
works that implement abswtract interfaces/protocols licensed freely
as free, in the manner of wine. ndiswrapper seems to fall close to
that, since it is not specific to any particular driver out there.
manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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