Re: MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[alírio eyng]

Isaac David:
>Parabola does ship fully free emulators for which no free games
>exist. At this moment the user has to opt-in for installing
>your-freedom_emu to block those packages, so it actually falls
>down somewhere between your "liberal" and "extremely liberal"
>categories.
"parabola follows extremely liberal without your-freedom_emu"
i thought it was common knowledge/implicit, my mistake

>My view was that while useless in a 100% free environment just
>having them installed and inspecting their user interfaces wouldn't
>violate your freedom in any way. A free emulator with free
>dependencies wouldn't be unethical unless it recommended using
>proprietary software with it.
agreed, but we shouldn't package useless things

> However in the last few days I have
>seen many arguments showing there are yet more valid uses I hadn't
>imagined, like learning from the source code and testing portability
>without leaving your comfy libre OS.
source code is out of question for a distro, unless you want to
compile and execute it (or just have a package that copy the source
code); but developing without a game is like developing without a test
suite...
"testing portability without leaving your comfy libre os" would only
be impeded by extremely conservative, that i reject

>In a distro without unprivileged package management like Parabola
>an opt-in blacklist could satisfy Jean Louis' parenting concerns, but
>only until the point the unprivileged users determined to run non-free
>software learn to look for applications outside the package manager.
applying a policy to unwilling people is a security issue, out of question
i'm interested in lessening the effort to remain in freedom (for
people willing it)
but your-freedom_emu is extremely conservative, it deny free uses; that i reject

>Meanwhile other emulators and wine are completely out of the
>question because there's free applications for them
i translate it as "extremely conservative/conservative is completely
out of the question"

you missed the main argument
"extremely liberal is naive because it just looks down in the
dependency dag, there's no reason to not look up"
i think i should try to explain better, included is a image
(emulator-dependency-dag.svg)
to _execute_ an emulator _usefully_, and to test during development,
we need all dependencies and a game
every one agree that if one dependency is nonfree, we can't _execute_
an emulator _usefully_ in freedom
several people miss: if all games are nonfree, we also can't _execute_
an emulator _usefully_ in freedom

maybe an analogy:
*extremely conservative is like nonfree software
*conservative is like agpl
*liberal is like gpl
*extremely liberal is like public domain
nonfree software is unreasonable (unethical) because it denies freedom
public domain is unreasonable (not unethical) because it doesn't protect freedom
gpl restrict freedom _directly_; gpl2 can't be linked with gpl3, even
both being free software; but it gives more freedom _indirectly_; and
in most cases we can make an exception, just releasing the gpl2 as
gpl2+
agpl gives yet more freedom, although it is more inconvenient in some cases

so agpl is better, gpl ok and public domain unreasonable (not
unethical), if your aim is freedom
_not denying_ freedom and _actively protecting_ it are different
even if _actively protecting_ freedom is inconvenient and we need to
make some exceptions, i believe it is better

expecting the user to evaluate if some game is free is making it
unnecessarily difficult to remain in freedom
making game packages/executables and not emulator packages/executables
would allow all know good uses and still signal the user to be
cautious with other games

emulator-dependency-dag.svg
Description: image/svg