On 09.08.2017 23:30, Jonas Smedegaard wrote: > Stuff like s3cmd are tools connecting to cloud services. Arguably > usable to have tools to free data from the clouds. > > ...but bug#856139 is, I believe, about a tool advertising a cloud > service which is *not* used by the tool. Instead that cloud service is > advertised as an option *instead* of installing and using the Free tool. > > Anyone having opinions more narrowly on that kind of advertisements?
And then you go to the bug and you see that it degenerated into a "if it uses a non-free service, it should go into contrib" subdiscussion. Since when do we believe that? Neither the DFSG nor the Social Contract would imply that you need to have a free server for an API client implementation. Now, I understand that this would be desirable and we should encourage it but we shouldn't just move goal posts willy-nilly. The only crucial sentence might be this one from ยง2.2.2 in the policy: "The contrib archive area contains supplemental packages intended to work with the Debian distribution, but which require software outside of the distribution to either build or function." The policy isn't something we voted upon. Do people really understand that this means tools calling an API on the Internet would need to be in contrib? I don't think I agree with this non-free'ization of Debian. Stuff like licq never belonged into contrib either, despite its main purpose back then being to connect to the ICQ (and MSN?) services. Someone wrote a Free client implementation, hence we should offer it to our users. I could pull other strawmans like "what about tools that connect to the telephone network, which is non-free?". Where would we even draw that line? Kind regards Philipp Kern
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