On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 03:03, Andrew Suffield wrote: > You seem to think it's so that somebody can take my docbook/sgml > document and convert it into a Word document, and distribute that > alone. If we accept this, it has to work the other way, too - If I release something in MS Word format, and someone converts it to nicely marked up DocBook, they have to keep distributing the MS Word document, too. Or if I write something in assembler and someone else changes it to C, they have to keep distributing the assembler. Or if I have some old EBCDIC documentation that's been GPLd, and I want to distribute it as ASCII, I need to keep distributing the EBCDIC - pure garbage on basically any modern system - with my ASCII version. (Someone's going to counter with "EBCDIC was dead long before the GPL"; replace EBCDIC with iso-8859-1 (or euc-kr, or whatever) and ASCII with UTF-8, and come see me in 10 years.) IMO the GPL is purposefully vague on this point; if someone (not just the copyright holder) can show reasonably that they preferred a certain form for modification, then they've met the terms of the GPL. (Remember, it's not preferred terms for *modification*, not *distribution*, so few people could make a convincing case "Well, I really did want it in ELF format".) > *That* would defeat the purpose of the GPL. The purpose of the GPL isn't to stop people from distributing MS Word documents, it's to make sure people have the ability to distribute, modify, and distribute modified versions of software (by which I mean any stream of bits) in a form that is convenient to modify. Amazingly, there are a lot of people that find MS Word documents, or assembler source, convenient to modify. Likewise, many people find SGML inconvenient. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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