On 3/29/06, Manoj Srivastava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Does the fact we are boith ignorant mean that the authors and > users of ndiswrapper be penalized?
Yes! ...ok, I don't mean exactly that, but I don't reject it either. Fundamentally, the only thing that keeps me from releasing a GPLed work-alike for ANY piece of non free-software (let's say Windows Vesta, if you want a concrete example) is my ignorance of how it works and what it does. This issue also holds for supplying the dependencies of software in Contrib. > I don't know how to use a large number of interpreters and > compilers in Debian (scheme, python, ...). Presumably, > you, too, are not omniscient (If you are, I do apologize, god). > If there is an intersection of these sets, should it have a > bearing on the freeness of the packages that live in that > intersection? I'm not asking for omniscience, nor any other signs of god-ness. The technical issue, I think, is: is the package complete in and of itself? If not, does Main contain what the package needs to make it complete. If we have libpureschemeeval.0.1.so which implements a complete scheme interpreter, which only supports the dotted pair data-structure and requires everything else to be implemented in the calling environment (parsing, garbage collection, result formatting, ...), that's fine. If, however, after some number of years, no one is using it (perhaps, among other reasons, because it doesn't exactly implement the right semantics), I'd be rather dubious about why we have the package at all. If, in addition, there are a number of users of the package, and all of them use it to wire gcc up to Microsoft's SQL Server, so it runs under linux, I'd be very very uncomfortable about this package. I'd feel much better about it if either (a) it was used actively for some obvious free software purpose, or (b) it was pulled from the distribution. Then again, I don't think we (the technical committee) would have the authority to pull the package. But I also don't think we should give this kind of situation unqualified approval. > > I don't understand why that means it's not in your universe. > > Cause I am all fere and pure, dude. Do try to keep up :) Hmm... let me try again: I don't think your keyboard and display are in your universe. So what I want to know is: who do you get to do your typing for you? -- Raul