

Re: LCC and blobs

* Matthew Garrett 

| You have argued that drivers don't really depend on firmware, but
| instead depend on the hardware expressing the correct interface. As an
| example, we can compare maria-vis, which depends on the graphviz
| package. maria-vis is in contrib, because it depends on graphviz, which
| is in non-free. But by your argument, it doesn't actually depend on
| graphviz - it merely depends on something that presents a correctly
| functioning graphviz interface. This could be a piece of non-free code,
| but it could also be a piece of free code, an interface to a remote
| application server, or a userspace application to drive hardware that
| kicks intelligent rodents until they draw the correct graph. There's no
| intrinsic dependency on the non-free code. But since the non-free code
| is currently the only solution that /does/ express the correct
| interface, there exists a dependency on non-free code.

However, if somebody writes a graphviz-client which just pushes the
dot file over the network to graphviz.example.com on some port and
gets a postscript file back, it can go into main.  No matter what
software said server is running.  Correct?

Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
                                                                      `. `' 

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