Re: Plan for tomorrows (20080522) FESCO meeting

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On May 22, 2008, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 16:27 +0200, Christian Iseli wrote:
>> /me rambles a bit...
>> 
>> Unless I'm mistaken, I assume such a libre system will run on ix86 and
>> x86_64 machines. 

> I assume Alex won't be including an interpreter for closed-source ACPI
> bytecode in his kernel.

Is this an intentional strawman, or do you really not get the point?

Why wouldn't I?  There's nothing offensive or immoral about the
interpreter, AFAIK.

What is offensive and immoral is the imposition of restrictions on the
bytecode that enables one's machine to work.  But the interpreter
itself can't tell whether it's offensive or immoral, since it doesn't
have brains to understand technical and legal restrictions that the
bytecode itself or its corresponding source code might be subject to.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva         http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member       ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}