On Tue, 17 Jun 2003, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > The chief obstacle you point to is that we wonder "preferred *by > whom*?"
I agree that this is the ambiguity which should be addressed. We also need to achieve consensus on whether a work can be free if the author's preferred form is only easily editable using proprietary (or even non-available) tools. I say it can, but I can't see how to phrase this requirement in a compatible way. > For the life of me, I cannot think of a case where the *real* > preferences would differ depending on who is being measured. Goodness, this is easy. There are a number of icons and images in products whose original creator preferred to edit in photoshop, with crazy psd files that contain layering, gamma, and other useful information. I made further modifications to the resulting GIF file. My preferred form is gif, hers is psd. I don't even have the psd anymore. Can my gif file ever be free? Can her psd file be free if it's in an undocumented format which is only editable in a proprietary tool? I say "yes" to both. I believe the requirement should be interpreted as the preferred form for modification by the distributor of the work. I would have no problem with a prohibition against explicit obfuscation. > It seems > to me that *everyone* would prefer modifying the C code for Emacs to > modifying the assembly code. Yup, this one seems unambiguous. It's less clear in the case where there's a custom preprocessor (that handles localization of strings or something) - if I do edits on the post-processed code, what is now the preferred form? -- Mark Rafn [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://www.dagon.net/>
