On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 02:35:01AM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote: > So say we have two drivers for a piece of hardware. One is written > without comments. One was originally commented, but the comments have > been removed. Both provide the same amount of information about how they > work. Both are released under the same license. Both provide exactly the > same freedoms to our users. > > How is one of these free and the other non-free?
One provided source, the other did not, and Debian considers having source fundamental to having a free program. Take it a step further, and say we have two drivers: one written in heavily- optimized, uncommented assembly, and one written in C, compiled with optimizations and disassembled. They look pretty much the same; as you say, both provide the "same freedoms to our users". Is disassembly output of a compiled program "source" to you? Is one free and the other non-free? (My answer is probably obvious: a disassembly dump of a program, no matter how good the disassembler, no matter that it used debug information to reconstruct function boundaries and resulted in assembly output practically equivalent to hand-written assembly code, is not source and isn't acceptable as such--even though a program that was actually written in assembly and resulted in the same thing would be.) -- Glenn Maynard -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
