On 2013-03-19 16:39, Jérémy Bobbio wrote:
Dear candidates, do you think that libechonest [3] should be called
free
software? As it requires software outside of the distribution to
function, do you think it should be moved to contrib? What about
s3cmd [4] then?
I don't think that having the facility to fetch or process non-free
data makes software non-free. It is normal for tools to be agnostic
about the licensing of data they process, even in cases where it's
almost certainly non-free. For example, the licensing of DVB broadcast
content is very unlikely to be free, but I don't think we should move
all DVB programs to contrib.
However, I would agree that making our users dependent on non-free data
sources is bad. This kind of problem isn't new: an old example is the
track information used in CD ripping tools. In that case community
efforts created free alternatives that the tools could use instead. As
a general principle, we might want to discourage default installations
of packages from automatically pulling in non-free data and thus
encouraging users to become dependent on it.
--
Moray
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