>That's an overly-expansive view of software. You would include >anything that is digital in that description -- audio CDs, DVD movies, >off-air TV signals, (actually, off-air TV signals are partly analogue, FYI...)
>books on disk, etc. I find it very hard to quantify >Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as software, even if it was recorded Oh, but a *recording* of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony could be considered software. Software, as opposed to hardware, which the CD player is. >digitally, given that the invention of software postdated its >composition by a LONG time -- Just because the word 'software' was coined quite recently doesn't mean that it can't refer to things older than that. Similarly, the word 'hardware' is a relatively recent coinage, but is applied to things which predate civilization. >I see it as fallacious reasoning to conclude that anything that is >binary is software. If I use some sort of binary "Morse code" to send >a message manually, why is it more of software than if I use the real >Morse code? OK, forget about binary. I'm having trouble coming up with the words which specify precisely what I mean. "Software is that stuff which isn't hardware (but lives on it)." That's what I'm getting at, and is basically the origin of the term, anyway. >> > Would it benefit Free Software? >> Yep. It would help promote the movement to have genuninely free manuals >> for those pieces of software; manuals which could be integrated into >> programs, used as help text, freely lifted from, etc. >I agree that this is good. But how does it promote Free Software to >strip manuals from Free programs? Separating non-free manuals out of Debian promotes the free-manuals movement. As I said above. And I consider that to be an essential part of the Free Software movement. (Also, Debian users expect to have a certain collection of rights for stuff distributed in 'main', and it is letting down Debian's users for that to be false. But that's an 'our users' argument rather than a 'free software' argument.) You could also ask: How does it promote Free Software to strip out almost-free software? How does it promote Free Software to strip out non-free fonts? The answers are precisely the same. It promotes the movement. It promotes the distinction between Free Software and non-free software. If you consider that answer invalid, then non-free (but freely redistributable) X-Windows and TeX fonts should be reinstated in main (since users wouldn't 'benefit' from their removal). Similarly, non-commercial-use-only software would belong in 'main'. Hope my thoughts and arguments help someone. I release the text into the public domain. :-) -- Nathanael Nerode <neroden at gcc.gnu.org> http://home.twcny.rr.com/nerode/neroden/fdl.html
