On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 04:26:26PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > Yet the ICQ client is not useful without a component which is not in > Debian and in fact is not freely available.
Nor is a driver useful without a piece of hardware which isn't in Debian. Of course, license permitting, Debian *could* distribute the ICQ server, but it's not necessary for the normal use of the client, since connecting to remote servers is the typical, expected use of the client. That's the basic element of this discussion: where is the line of a "requirement", to satisfy the SC's "will not require"? There are many places the line can be drawn, and more than one of them are internally consistent. I'm just showing how it's consistent to allow an ICQ client without an ICQ server, while not allowing a driver without firmware or an emulator without a ROM: the driver and the emulator are fundamentally incomplete without the ROM image--users will install it, it won't work, they'll grumble, read the documentation and install the non-free piece. The ICQ client is not incomplete without providing a server, since the server isn't generally within the scope of the operating system; it's on the internet, and that's where it's naturally expected to be. It seems natural to allow ICQ clients; it seems contrived and inconsistent to allow the drivers. Again, I don't really object to these drivers being present as part of a kernel, or a driver compilation; the set as a whole does work, and the nonfunctioning driver just seems like an optional feature that doesn't work, just as programs in main are allowed to use non-free shared libraries, as long as it's optional. > If the emulators were extended to be able to fetch some basic ROM images > off the internet by themselves (eg via HTTP), could they go in main? This doesn't seem any different than "installer" packages; it seems like they should go in contrib for the same reasons. -- Glenn Maynard
