On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 04:19:29AM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > 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. Sounds reasonable. > Or if I write something in assembler and someone else changes it to C, > they have to keep distributing the assembler. Likewise. > 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. This one probably doesn't count, any more than putting something in a tarball - it's a transport encoding change, with no appreciable effect on the content (unlike C/assembly, or docbook/word, which will inevitably change the content in translation). > 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. This means that I can take your GPLed application, modify the binary directly (I prefer this form because it is required by my business model), and redistribute that - without the source to my changes, since I don't prefer that form. I reject all interpretations which lead to this result as fundamentally flawed. > (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. See above. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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