On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 08:49:07PM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: > On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 12:21:59AM +0100, Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote: > > * Though it's generally a good thing that the GPL requires me to > > provide source, this requirement gives less benefit in the case of > > text and can have some unpleasant consequences. For example, if > > someone makes a derived work from my GPL work and "typesets" it using > > Microsoft Word and I want to distribute a modified version of that > > derived work, then the other person can quite reasonably claim that > > the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is a > > Microsoft Word document, which would be highly inconvenient for me. > > This is why, when using the GPL for things which are not clearly > program source code, you must always specify what the preferred form > for modification is (append it to the license declaration, which > should be just below the copyright declaration).
That defeats the purpose of the very careful wording in the GPL: "preferred form". If my preferred form for editing a document is really a Word document, I should be able to distribute it in that form (no matter how much the original author despises it), just as I should be able to distribute a program converted to APL[1] if that's really my preferred form for modifications. The GPL doesn't say "the original author's preferred form for modifications", and that's not an error. [1] ignoring the practical difficulties of converting programs between languages -- Glenn Maynard
