On Fri, 13 Jun 2003 01:10:23 +0100 Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 04:21:35PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > 4) The freedom to change the Work for any purpose[1], to distribute > > one's changes, and to distribute the Work in modified form. Access > > to the form of the work which is preferred for making modifications, > > if applicable, is a precondition for this. > > I contemplated a few ways to rephrase it, but whenever I tried, I > found myself arriving back at the first sentence again[1]. As such, I > think it'd be best to remove the second one outright; the freedom is > already adequetely described by the first. *Any* form which allows you > to modify the work for any purpose, is good enough. There are all sorts of tools out there that patch binaries, most of which may be nefarious; however, it does allow you to modify the work for any purpose. It's just obscenely difficult to do so for any but the most trivial of changes. How about: 4) The freedome to change the Work for any purpose, to distribute one's changes, and to distribute the Work in modified form. Access to the form of the Work in which the original author uses for making changes (if applicable) is a precondition for this. That'd get all realistic definitions of "source", and will stop people from saying "I want it in LaTeX, I don't care if you use plaintext files." Some rephrasing I think is still necessary; I don't like the "original" in there, but without it somebody might think the author is the person who's requesting the source.
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