Re: Defining 'preferred form for making modifications'
Scripsit tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
> Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net> writes:
> > > for the simple reason that if you have distributed that, then the
> > > "raw pixels of the gif" are still accessible and can be edited,
> > But if they are not the preferred form, it is illegal to edit them (at
> > least, it it illegal to distribute the edited gifs). So what's the
> > point of being *able* to do so?
> What? Who on earth said it was illegal to edit things other than the
> preferred form?
The GPL says that. It says that you mustn't distribute anything
without giving the preferred form for it, and if we go by your premise
that gifs are not the preferred form, then my modified gifs have no
preferred form at all. Hence it is impossible for me to distribute
them legally.
> Nothing in the GPL says that, but the fact that you have edited them
> means that you consider them, for the purpose of that edit, to be
> preferred.
But you just claimed that the xcf is the preferred form "for
everyone". Please make up your mind.
> > What would that help? The xcf files are no longer the source of the
> > gifs that are distributed. They may be source of something else, but
> > the GPL has never required that you distribute any source but the one
> > for the binaries you distribute.
> The source in this case *IS* the xcf files,
The xcf may be source for somethine, but there is no way it can be
source for the modified gifs. The latter pictures look entirely
different from the xcfs.
> The reason is quite clear: because otherwise one could very trivially
> escape the GPL's requirements entirely,
I don't think that a "loophole" argument is a convincing argument for
fixing an unreasonable interpretation of "preferred form".
--
Henning Makholm "Monarki, er ikke noget materielt ... Borger!"
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