Branden Robinson wrote:
Evan was fishing for support for his position in a recent thread entitled
"Visualboy Advance question."[1]. "Some other debian-legal people" appears to
refer to Humberto Massa, in one message.[2]
To be clear: I was soliciting information, not hustling for votes. No
one seemed to have the full history on the emulator issue, so I was
trying to get the background on it. There was some confusion on the
matter; see, for example, this post:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/06/msg00472.html
Evan did at one point moderate his thinking a bit[3].
It's probably not a good idea to take every discussion on debian-legal
as an argument. My theory at the time was that the old PC emulators'
dependence on non-free system OS ROMs (like the atari800 package) had
been fossilized into a policy that _all_ emulators depend on non-free
software and thus go in contrib.
It seems that that's not the case. We actually don't allow packages into
main if there's not publicly-available, DFSG-free data for them to work
with. Like, we wouldn't let a new word-processor into main without at
least one Free document in the word processor's format, and we wouldn't
let a new programming-language interpreter into main without at least
one Free script that uses the language.
That strikes me as odd, as it reverses the direction of dependency we
normally use in Depends:. But discussion here seems to show that that's
actually the case, and I accept it even if I find it weird.
~ESP