Re: Preprints/Reprints of Academic Papers in Packages
On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 01:14:50AM -0700, John Galt wrote:
> >The form of a {program,document} that is intended for modification. This
> >includes perl scripts (unless they've been run through an obfuscator),
> >human-editable HTML, and human-editable PDF. It clearly doesn't include
> >most generated PDF.
>
> So the Free Software Manifesto doesn't have any source at all, since it's
> an invariant, and therefore not intended for modification? I'm going to
> go ahead and open a can of worms here and ask if Pine has a source, since
> it is clearly not intended for modification other than by UW. Do DJB
> programs have a source: they're also clearly not intended for
> modification.
The form of the FSM, the Pine source and so on are ones that are intended to
be modifiable. That doesn't mean other factors (copyrights) don't make it
illegal.
I also didn't claim that this was a comprehensive definition, and didn't
intend it to be; it was just a reasonable one that fit what you asked for.
(A comprehensive definition of "source" is hard to come by. Feel free to
try to supply one ...)
> >There's also the case where there's no human-editable forms; ie, a document
> >created in Word, saved as DOC and exported to HTML. Now there's no source at
> >all.
>
> Isn't a Word doc clearly intended for modification, with Word?
And we're back at the fact that "source", like "software", is hard to define,
and sometimes it's even hard to tell intuitively. (With respect to exported
HTML I suppose the original Word document is the source; but it hardly seems
correct to call it that.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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