On Thu, 03 Mar 2005, Matthew Garrett wrote: > I don't think /my/ preferred form of modification is more special > than the author's, but if nobody but the author is in a reasonable > position to alter the code then I don't think that's free.
If this is because the author is withholding information, then I agree... but if it's just because no one else can think in machine code, than I disagree. > Free software is supposed to give us independence from the author - > that's not possible if the work is effectively unmodifiable by > anyone else. If I could find some way of specifying this without going the road of the GFDL, where it unecessarily restricts the license to very specific forms of sourcecode, I would consider it. However, the attempts that I've seen always seem to outlaw rather useful applications that the GPL's definition appears to allow. > Don Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The whole point of requiring sourcecode, as I see it, is so that > > users (and Debian) have the same form that the author uses to > > modify the code, so we're capable of making the same kind of > > modifications as the author. > > I'd disagree - I think we want sourcecode because we want to be able > to modify the work. That's subtly different to what you're > suggesting, and there are works that could fall in one and not the > other. From the point of view of modifiability, I don't think the > author should be considered special. But who gets to decide? To someone who thinks in machinecode, perl[1] may be just as difficult to modify as machinecode is for me. I can modify the code, and anyone possessing the skillset that I have can modify the code. There's nothing I possess that can possibly be distributed that would help them modify the software that they don't have. > As I said before, I think I have a fundamentally different take on > why we want source code to the general view here. Yeah, I think we both agree on the main point of why we want sourcecode, we just differ on whether or not we will let the author use things that a "normal person"[2] wouldn't be capable of modifing that the author (and those with an equivalent skillset) would be. Frankly, there really shouldn't be any works that fall into this narrow region[3] being distributed in Debian anyway, on the purely technical grounds that the maintainer isn't capable of maintaining the code. Don Armstrong 1: To pick my favorite, but much maligned, language 2: Whatever that means 3: Oh yes, firmware. (Rhetorical) Why are we distributing code that we can't maintain? -- "The trouble with you, Ibid" he said, "is that you think you're the biggest bloody authority on everything" -- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p146 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
