On Du, 04 dec 11, 11:36:57, Alexey Eromenko wrote: > Hello Debian People !
Are you aware we are just users? [snip] > What's your opinion ? A somewhat similar case: instant messenger clients. Not long ago some of the free (as in beer) instant messaging providers made incompatible changes to their protocols. It was a pain for users as most had to upgrade pidgin and a backport was not immediately available (imagine *days* without instant messaging, what a disaster :p ). Does this mean we should remove all clients accessing non-free services (or disable the respective option if the client can also use free (as in freedom) protocols)? IMVHO, as long as its code itself is free why not ship it? It would be a big dis service to the users and would not convince the providers to change their policies (we are still too few to count). Also, as far as I know it is not forbidden to reverse-engineer a communication protocol (assuming it is not public anyway), otherwise Samba would have been in trouble loooong ago. I think that making it easier for users to switch to free software (even partially, pidgin works fine also on Windows) helps more to spread the word about free software[1], than taking an extreme stance and just banish everything that might come in touch with non-freeness. [1] a lot of Firefox-on-Windows users I know actually have no idea that it is *also* free software, besides being gratis, but it is always a good example when they are ready to listen about it. Regarding your mention of the "man on deserted island" test: - all software depending on some central service would stop working anyway, even if the service was free (as in freedom) - the code of the client program could help to write a server program from scratch to communicate with fellow stranded people :D Kind regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic
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