[Savannah-hackers] Re: submission of Network Audio Driver - send sound from a mac to esound - savannah.nongnu.org

[Mathieu Roy]

> >>> Is Darwin completely free software, as in freedom?
> >>
> >> As far as I am aware there is a GUN-Darwin project
> >> http://gnu-darwin.org
> >>
> >> I think there were some making-RMS-unhappy type things
> >> in apple's original license but I think they fixed that up
> >> in 2001.
> >
> > It's not about whether someone (RMS for instance) is happy or not,
> > it's about whether it's free software or not.
> >
> > GNU Darwin people said:
> >
> > "First, we are making explicit and binding the following policy.
> > GNU-Darwin will not support or distribute any software which links to
> > proprietary libraries, and that includes Cocoa, Carbon, CoreAudio, etc.
> > There will be no native package manager from GNU-Darwin (pkg_add
> > suffices)."
> >
> > I haven't time to figure out how is exactly licensed Darwin: what
> > matters here is whether your module can be used on a completely free
> > system.
> 
> Where do you draw the completely-free-system line? Can it have closed
> BIOS? Patents on the CPU? Closed OS? Closed CPU microcode? Closed
> NIC firmware? Do you need a completely free boot-strapping process?
> On what system would you hand-assemble your boot loader?
> 
> Darwin is an open OS, my driver relies only on darwin, it is much more
> open than say, Solaris, which most of the GNU stuff runs on, in fact
> I believe that before Linux, GNU was always run on a closed Unix.

There is no problem running free software ontop of a proprietary
system. There is a problem when a free software require a proprietary
software to run.

> > I was thinking that Darwin is released under APSL. If so, it's not
> > free software and we cannot host your project. If I'm mistaking,
> > can you give a pointer to the Darwin license?
> >
> > http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html
> 
> Thankyou for your time, while it is a little frustrating, I do respect
> the FSFs principled stand on this kind of thing.

So Darwin is still non-free? This is frustrating.

Regards,


-- 
Mathieu Roy
 
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