etoys now available in Debian's non-free repository

[Albert Cahalan]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 3:02 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org> wrote:

>  Before drifting to a new topic, let me make sure one thing; did you
> get convinced that FSF's definition of software freedom doesn't
> contradict with a binary image file with right tools to fully
> explore/understand/modify it?

I don't subscribe to the notion that the FSF defines open source.
Heck, I don't care for them and they don't care for open source.

>> A good situation would be that you can build the image from
>> plain text just like GNU Smalltalk does. That could happen on
>> the laptop when the activity starts, or when the activity is created.
>>
>> The next best thing would be to supply a custom editor
>> which is **external** to the image, along with any other
>> tools needed to edit and create the image. It should be
>> possible to start from some standard build tools, feeding
>> in a mix of source code and standard media files, to end
>> up with a set of tools. Note that you could write such
>> tools in Smalltalk if you used GNU Smalltalk, which is
>> able to be bootstrapped.
>
>  You never explained why these things are "good".

Right. I'm also not explaining why software freedom is
good, why maintainability is good, why interoperability
is good, etc. Values are values.

>> This idea of applying patch collections is disturbing. It reminds
>> me of the terrible mess that Minix was back in 1991, when the
>> license permitted people to share patches but not code with
>> the patches applied. Here you have a technical limit instead
>> of a legal one, but I expect that the result is not much different.
>
>  No, no. You don't get it.  Applying patch happens when building a
> release image and the resulting image gets into a package to be
> distributed.  It is just the same as compiling an executable binary
> from source code and distribute the binary.

I got that. The fundamental problem is the patch collection.
There is a problem even if you can distribute the result.
Patches need to be applied. If you do that, and distribute
a blob, then we're back to the blob problem. If you don't do
that, then we have the Minix problem.