Jeremy Hankins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > First of all (and most telling, to my view) there's are a lot of > "reasonably" in this definition. I think you're using these to paper > over a lot of difficult cases. It doesn't work very well for our > purposes because different people will always have different ideas of > what's reasonable. This is as opposed to the "preferred form" which in > the end depends on matters of fact (e.g., does the author *actually* > prefer that form?)
Indeed. It's not intended to be a formal definition - it's how I feel we should treat source code. I don't claim that phrasing it in a useful way would be easy. However, I don't believe that we should be deciding such matters on the basis of ease of phrasing. > Secondly, it seems that your definition is going to require extensive > documentation in cases where the knowledge required to modify the code > is specialized or arcane. Does a kernel patch require a treatise on > kernel internals to accompany the patch? For that matter, does it > require a copy of the kernel? After all, you can't very effectively > modify the patch without the kernel as well. If it's impractical for anyone other than the author to modify the code, then I think it's insufficiently modifiable. If the information needed to modify the code is either fairly widely known or fairly easily learned, then that doesn't apply. > And how about which modifications we should allow for? Is it reasonable > that I want to take the source for mutt, insert whitespace to make it > look like an ascii art dog, and put it on display? Or use elisp code in > a high performance environment? Or perhaps it's "reasonable" that I > take message processing code from an MTA and use it in some MUA... but > the languages are different. Should I demand the author translate it > for me? I don't think the mutt case is desperately important as far as free software is concerned, but if you weren't able to do that it would imply that you couldn't do many other things. It's reasonable to want to be able to incorporate code from an MTA into an MUA - it's not reasonable to expect to be able to do so for any given pair of them. >> The form that the author used to create a work should be irrelevent to >> freeness. A 20 megabyte binary-only application is non-free, even if the >> author wrote and maintains it in a hex-editor. The author's preferred >> form for modification is a good metric, but not the be-all and end-all >> of whether a work provides sufficient freedom. > > I'm afraid I simply disagree here. I'm not willing to go to an author > and say "If you write in machine code your work can never be Free." If nobody other than the author can modify a work, in what way is it free? We'd laugh at a license that attempted to claim that. Making it impossible through technical means should be equally non-free, even if that wasn't the author's intent. -- Matthew Garrett | [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
