Re: [gNewSense-users] Add/Remove... suggestion to install or work with non-free software

[Sam Geeraerts]

Ali Davoodifar schreef:
> On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 6:03 AM, Karl Goetz <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > ndiswrapper exists purely to load non-free software. I'm certainly not
> > aware of any free drivers that ndiswrapper could load. Have you any
> > examples?
>
> The point of free software is that it should be free to be used for
> "whatever" purpose the user has a need to. Not all the ways the
> software may be used in the future are known to the developer, and
> this is as it should be. Ultimately it is the user that decides what
> to do with the software.
>
> There may not be any known examples of free software use for it at
> present, but there may be in the future, who knows? At the very least
> it can be regarded as an object of study, which is a perfectly valid
> "use" in and of itself.
>
> ndiswrapper is free software, therefore there's no need for removal
> out of a software freedom perspective.
I tend to agree with this point of view. We remove (or modify) packages
for two reasons:

- being/including non-free software: not the case here.
- recommending the use of non-free software: the package description
speaks about "Windows drivers", which does not equal "non-free drivers".
If the software doesn't pull any non-free drivers/blobs off the Net and
the documentation is also "clean", then there's no problem here. The 
README points to the wiki [1], which might in turn have pointed to 
non-free software, but it doesn't seem to exist anymore.

Removing it would unnecessarily make it harder for people to use this
free package if they would find a practical use for it that doesn't
involve non-free software (even if that is unlikely).

And it's also included in the Free Software Directory [2], which implies 
that it complies with FSF's policy and thus gNewSense's policy.

[1] http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/wiki/
[2] http://directory.fsf.org/project/ndiswrapper/