Paul Winkler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Michael Stutz wrote:
> > - Making an authoritative "source" available is going to be necessary,
...
> that depends on the author's goals.
It's an important point. If the ramifications of a license aren't
compatible with an author's goals, they shouldn't use it.
An author can add a brief "free to copy, distribute and modify" or
"free to copy and distribute" clause to his copyright, without
mentioning or obliging the source at all. This doesn't qualify as Open
Source and certainly not copyleft, but if that is what an author wants
they should have the right to do that.
As you said, the source isn't going to always be important to
everyone, for each particular work -- I bet _most_ users of open
source software have never requested or looked at _any_ of the
source.
Equally important to having the source available is that everyone has
the freedom to share any object form of a work -- to copy, distribute
and modify it. (Making beats from records, sampling
records/cds/mp3s/etc, quoting or cut-and-pasting html from the object
form of a novel or other text, extracting pages from a PostScript
file, and so forth.)
But even while most licensees will be happy to just share and use
verbatim copies of the work with no modification at all, or sample a
part of it, or make a change to the object, it's necessary (if you,
the author, want to copyleft it) to make the source available, should
someone need or want access to see or study how you did it, or to make
the kind of modification or conversion you can only make with total
access to the source. (What happens to your song when mp3 goes out of
favor? Do we rely on you or your posthumous estate to remix the
source files and save to the latest format, or do we convert the lossy
mp3?)
Some musicians want to sample, some want to remix. Others want both,
or some other variation of [re]using your data.
> > - But it should be done in such a way so that it isn't a great burden
> > for a non-commercial party.
>
> right. I should really stop harping on this so much...
Well, you have a point -- it's something to consider before we all
jump into this.
If we publish things with large sources, we have to be prepared to
supply them. But the key word is "publish" -- it keeps getting easier
to publish more and larger works, and you can now pubish something
digital or electronic and everyone can have a copy for free -- but
there's still a 'cost' invovled in the act of publishing, and
supplying the source is still one of them. (Not saying that it should
be at a financial loss to the author/publisher -- see below.)
> > Some "handling" is probably to be expected -- but it should always be
> > within some reasonable limit, whatever the acceptable norm is.
>
> This is a bit hard to determine, isn't it?
...
> Right, but if they're selling CDs for a profit maybe they can afford
> to post sources on an ftp server?
You know what it's probably going to have to be? The hard stance: if
the sources are too big for you to put on a Web page or otherwise make
available at no cost to you, you can make them available for a fee
only to cover transportation and media -- no more.
(There'd be no limit on what you can charge for those "deluxe distros"
of source and object, though...)
