Evan Prodromou <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, 2004-06-22 at 19:02, Josh Triplett wrote: > > > While I agree that it is not necessarily required that a Free package > > Depend on some piece of Free data for it to operate on, I do believe > > that if there is _no_ Free data for the package to run with, and that > > data is required in order to operate, then the package must go in > > contrib until at least one free piece of data is available. > > I just don't think that software Depends: on the data it manipulates the > way that it Depends: on, say, libraries or other programs. > > It also seems terribly unhackerly. I mean, heck: if I'd like to create > some Free Gameboy ROMs, I'd want to do it on a Free operating system. > > Lastly, I guess there's just something really violating about thinking > that Debian is judging the data I have, or could have, on my hard drive. > So I'm not working with Free data. So what? Mind your own beeswax, > Debian.
This was all discussed to death when Quake 2 was GPL'd [1]. The main problem I see is that if you accept these arguments, contrib becomes empty. Whether you like it or not, there is a value judgement going on with contrib vs. main. If something is not "useful" enough with non-free bits, then it goes into contrib. Regards, Walter Landry [EMAIL PROTECTED] [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2001/12/msg01723.html