On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 05:36:39PM +0100, A Mennucc wrote: > Luke Schierer wrote: > > Your interpretation of "free software" is plain wrong: > you are confusing "ability to modify" with "legal right to modify".
Whether or not there is a difference between the two depends rather heavily on the enforcability and legality of end user licencse agreements. > > Good hackers have the "ability to modify" the binary code in proprietary > programs and OSs , but they lack the "legal right to modify" again, see above. Court decisions on this have gone both ways. Vault v. Quaid, 847 F.2d 255 (5th Cir. 1988) for example struck down a law making them enforcable. > > With Open Source Software and Free Software, they have > "ability to modify" and "legal right to modify" the binary code > and the source code as well (as long as they abide by the license) > assuming there is a meaningful definitionof source for that package. But as this thread has amply shown, it is entirely possible to come up with things that have no meaningful source. Pictures, graphics in general. sufficiently complex programs that require knowledge that the average person doesn't have to understand the function of. we've even seen someone suggest that if a programmer for some unknown reason *wants* to write in machine language, he or she can never make his program free software! to me, this means that we are taking the necessity of source code too far for it to be useful, important, or meaningful. cvs or other repositories are nice and all, as is knowing the history of a project, what patches have been proposed, rejected, accepted, so on. and on the other hand, yes a sufficiently skilled person can edit a binary. but the importance and value of free software/open source software necessarily comes between both extremes. you simply cannot require I distribute intangibles like my knowledge of gaim and its history, or Sean Egan's knowledge of yahoo authentication, you can require that he and I distribute the code we actually edit, in whatever form we edit it, if we want to call it free software. but if we choose to edit it as a jpeg, or in machine language, or in hex, that should not be sufficient to make our work, under the same license it was the day before we made that commit, giving you the same rights it did the day before, the same access it did the day before, non-free. Gaim has actually had hex (though never, to my knowledge, true machine language.) in it, we did an april fools joke that way once. a hex string is substantialyl harder to edit than the corresponding ascii that does the same thing, does that make that copy of gaim non-free? No, our copies had it in hex as well, some gaim developers just happen to have the ability to read a hex string, your lack of that ability does not restrict your rights. free software is not a methodology, "write it in a high level language or it is non-free," it is a grant of permission on a COPYRIGHT license. what makes a it free is that you can redistibute it after you changed it, redistribute it at all really. You always had the right to change a copy you legally obtained. its called fair use. open source is not a methodology either, "write it in a high level language or it is not open source" either. rather, it is giving other developers *with the same skill sets and tools* the ability to work in the same medium you work in. While I'd doubt that anyone actually does work in machine language, IF someone did (note the hypothetical here, don't go introducing "but he must really be hiding some source somewhere) then he shoudl be able to put his code under the gpl and call it free software just like any c program under the gpl. *shrugs* I'm not a debian developer, I'm just chiming in here because I don't like to see debian, which I've been using for years now, move towards a silly restrictive idea of what constitutes free software, one that removes my freedom as a developer to decide how I want to write my program. luke -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
