Re: [GNU-linux-libre] MAME emulator is giving incentive to use non-free software

[Isaac David]

Hi,

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.

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. 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.

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.

(I lied. Parabola has unprivileged package management thanks to
Guix)[1]

Meanwhile other emulators and wine are completely out of the
question because there's free applications for them, even though
using the non-free ones is more common. Parabola documents emulators
extensively in a wiki page.[2] The wiki also considers aspects such
as the possibility of writing free software for free emulator
platforms which currently have no free games/applications as far as
it's known (i,e. whether free toolchains targeting those platforms
exist). I also had a good laugh learning about free emulators that
will only run on wine.


[1]: https://www.parabola.nu/packages/?q=guix
[2]: https://wiki.parabola.nu/Emulator_licensing_issues

Le mar. 29 mars 2016 à 10:31, alírio eyng <address@hidden> a 
écrit :
> these are the approaches i can think:
> *extremely conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
>  removing all emulators
> *conservative (eliminating false positive errors)[1]
>  make packages/executables like game1-emulator1, game1-emulator2, ...
> and not allowing direct emulator installation/execution
> *liberal (avoiding false positive errors[1] and false negative 
> errors[2])
>  allowing all emulators with free games know
> *extremely liberal (eliminating false negative errors)[2]
>  allowing all emulators
>
> extremely liberal is naive because it just looks down in the
> dependency dag, there's no reason to not look up
> extremely conservative is naive because it doesn't allow completely 
> free uses
> conservative would solve the issues that originate this thread
> liberal is more convenient in some cases
>
> i consider conservative better, liberal ok, and any of the extremes 
> unreasonable
>
> fsdg doesn't allow extremely liberal (according to other people
> interpretation), in ndiswrapper, for example:
> "with one exception, all ndis drivers are nonfree--and the one free
> one is a windows port of a native linux driver. so right now, this
> isn't useful for anything besides using nonfree software"[3]
>
> parabola follows extremely conservative with your-freedom_emu[4]
>
> assuming we choose conservative; for wine, we can make guile-wine,
> emacs-wine[5] and gnutls-wine[6], but remove wine
>
> it seems there's at least one free game needing an emulator[7]
>
> i think this is a discussion about fsdg[8] and we should discuss it at
> address@hidden
>
> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_positive_error
> [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/false_positives_and_false_negatives#False_negative_error
> [3]https://libreplanet.org/wiki/List_of_software_that_does_not_respect_the_Free_System_Distribution_Guidelines
> [4]https://www.parabola.nu/packages/libre/any/your-freedom_emu/
> [5]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-03/msg01216.html
> [6]https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2014-11/msg00333.html
> [7]http://pineight.com/lu/
> [8]http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html