Re: a minimal copyleft
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
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