* Matthew Garrett: > There's two main issues here. > > 1) Does everything in main have to include the preferred form of > modification? > > I don't believe so,
We had a GR that is usually interpreted in a manner which disagrees with you. Certainly we require that the DFSG apply to documentation. As I've stated repeatedly, nothing in that GR grants us permission to exempt fonts, artwork or cryptographic certificates from the source code requirements. The certificates part might be somewhat drastic, but I think that it's highly desirable to have source code for all the technical documentation we ship, under reasonably permissive licenses, so that we can update it as needed. This obviously includes technical artwork. Looking at the gsfonts bugs, there even is a completely *technical* justification to have the source code equivalent for fonts. Similar things might happen with artwork whose vectorized (or non-flattened) version we do not require. > and it's trivial to demonstrate that this isn't the > current situation (see the nv driver in the X.org source tree, for > instance). I think the last time the nv reference popped up, nobody could confirm that the source code has been deliberately obfuscated. It seems to be the real thing, but there is not enough public documentation to make any modifications which change the way the driver interacts with the hardware. > The DFSG require the availability of source code, and it > seems reasonable to believe that anything that can be reasonably > modified falls into that catagory. The graphics are available in a form > that can be modified with free tools (the .xpm files). Modifiying them is like patching object code. It can be done, but we have chosen not do it that way. We can choose differenly for artwork, of course, but I'm not sure if it's desirable to do so. Some practical limits obviously exist, though, but they don't apply to ray-traced images. > 2) Does a GPLed work have to include the preferred form of modification? > > Probably, and this may include the source code for the graphics. > However, this may also be affected by the copyright holder's > interpretation of the preferred form of modification and whether the > GPLed code is a derived work of the graphics or not. On the other hand, > if we accept my opinion on point (1), even if we need to include the > pov-ray models we are not required to build from them in order to > satisfy the DFSG. I think it's not acceptable to yse pregenerated files to prevent software from entering contrib. (Look at all the Java programs, for instance.) If there's a povray dependency, the software cannot be included in main. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
