On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 11:55:16PM +0200, Jean Louis wrote: > I am free software user. I don't want my children to find MAME on my > computer. I have 3 children. They will be using free software > distributions, with free software BIOS on free hardware. > > I don't want my children to find MAME on computer. I don't want them to > search for software in GuixSD and find MAME, and later to find ROMs, > which are non-free.
There's a lot worse things they could be searching for, such as nonfree video games or Skype. Guix gives them the freedom to package and install what they want, so I guess that solution here is to teach them about nonfree software. > Including MAME or any other emulator, even though non-free as such, if > such emulator is practically of no use to free software users without > non-free additions or parts, firmware, blobs, or ROMs, is giving > incentive to free software users to use non-free. > > Put yourself in the view point of free software user. What such user is > going to do with WINE? What is he/she/it going to do practically with > MAME? Nothing. They will have no use of that software. Single cases are > exceptions. Exceptions may download it themselves, they don't need to > get it delivered by free software distribution of GNU. One could argue this about free clients for websites that use nonfree Javascript. MAME is finally free software, and I imagine it could be used for teaching how computers work in a controlled environment for one. I think it's extremely dangerous for us to decide what use software is for other people. > My username is jmarciano. Please see discussion here: > https://gnunet.org/bot/log/guix/2016-03-28 While Dave sums up reality, I was surprised to learn of interesting uses that I hadn't thought of: > <paroneayea> about wine > <paroneayea> I recently had a friend use Wine to run an old copy of Blender > <paroneayea> which is free software > <paroneayea> because he couldn't get the ancient version of blender > to load in any modern gnu/linux distro I was even more surprised that MAME *is used for educational purposes* without any ROMs at all: > <rain1> MAME's purpose is to preserve decades of software history. As > electronic technology continues to rush forward, MAME prevents this > important \"vintage\" software from being lost and forgotten. This is > achieved by documenting the hardware and how it functions. The source > code to MAME serves as this documentation This also makes me wonder whether it'd be interesting to include free ROMs, like Unix for the PDP-11. > I cannot believe that MAME and WINE and such emulators are to be > included in free software distributions. MAME clearly gives incentive to > use non-free software. Wine is probably one of the most important pieces of software we have for liberating software. For instance, I can take free software that only runs on Windows that's too hard to immediately port to GNU/Linux and run it, or begin a transitional porting effort using Winelib. Furthermore, this could be vital to running programs needed to bootstrap old tools in the future, which Chris Webber alluded to. > I am asking you to review and correct if possible, the inclusion of > packages such as: WINE and MAME into GNU distribution GuixSD. > > Everybody can download WINE and MAME onto their computers. There may be > legitimate reasons to use such software, but what about practical > results? How about we don't worry about what people can use software for but rather what the software is? I have a feeling this email isn't going to satisfy you at all, so I think the solution is to not use GuixSD or any system that gives people freedom to run whatever software they want for whatever purpose they want. > Jean Louis Jookia.
