On Tue, May 11, 1999 at 06:26:11PM -0700, Ben Gertzfield wrote: > Richard> I think that the best basic policy is that a package can > Richard> go in `main' if it doesn't require any non-free software > Richard> *on your machine*. Making use of non-free software on > Richard> another machine is unfortunate but does not put you in > Richard> the same moral dilemma as having it on your own machine. > > This is an excellent basic policy, but how far does the definition of > "software *on your machine*" extend? > > Are ROM images, which are required for Macintosh, Commodore 64, and > other emulators, software? There's generally no source code available > for those beasties. But you're required to have them *on your machine* > in order to have the emulators work.
My understanding is that since these cannot be distributed legally (you
must make the copies yourself from your own roms technically or at least
only have the images of the ROMs you own) they are non-free and the
emulators go into contrib.
I generally believe this is the same as the system BIOS and these things
should probably be allowed into main if they are otherwise free. An
example of the kind of thing coming to mind would be a SDK for a system
that runs on Linux and then the emulator to test them. Since I don't
actually know of any SDKs on Linux that have matching emulators at the
moment, I'll not push this one.
> Is this any different than, say, LILO only being able to run on a
> machine with a non-free BIOS? You have to legally purchase the BIOS,
> for which no source code is available, before you can use LILO (or
> Linux, for that matter!) -- does this make LILO non-free?
BIOS is hardware. lilo should not be contrib just because it talks to
hardware any more than tik should be because it talks to a server.
> To complicate matters, it's *possible* to buy a hardware card for a
> standard IBM-compatible PC with the Macintosh ROMs on it. Does this
> make a DFSG-free Macintosh emulator go into main? contrib? non-free?
Ack.
--
Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am amazed that no-one's based a commercial distribution on Debian yet -
it is by far the most solid UNIX-like OS I've ever installed, and I've
played with HP/UX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BSDi, and SCO (not to mention OS/2,
Novell, Win95/NT)
-- Nathan Norman
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