Le Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 04:24:36PM +0200, Michael Banck a écrit : > On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 11:13:45PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > > They may be useless without additional data, but this is the same as > > drivers that are useless without additional hardware. > > I don't buy this analogy - usually, drivers are programmed for existing > (or soon-to-be-existing) hardware, so the additional hardware is > obtainable, just possibly not-existent for the user. > > On the other hand, the free data files you are talking about *are* > non-existant and unobtainable.
Hi Michael, any analogy is discutable, and fortunately it is not the main point of my argument. By the way I would like to add another point, that the split between contrib and non-free is not informative. A program in contrib can be tightly coupled to a non-free library in a way that would require a considerable amount of work to free it. On the other hand, a program in non-free can be so because of re-using non-free code that can be easily removed. For instance, the seaview package went from main to non-free when it gained the possibility to do some kind of phylogenetic analysis, and if one would remove this function, the resulting program would still be completely functional and would be an improvement compared to the last free version. Have a nice day, -- Charles Plessy Debian Med packaging team, http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120430224650.ge17...@falafel.plessy.net
