Re: Suggestion to maintainers of GFDL docs

[Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.org>]

A Microsoft Word document is probably "source code" rather than
"object code": people do edit Microsoft Word documents, and people
don't usually do automatic translations into Microsoft Word format
(though they do sometimes, for example when exporting from another
word processor).

Anyway, I don't think people distributing Word versions of free
documentation is likely to be much of a problem in practice, so I
would advise against concocting dodgy clarifications of the GPL that
attempt to prohibit this practice.

Distribution of optimised PDFs and the like without providing the
corresponding source is clearly disallowed by the GPL.

Edmund