On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 15:26, Glenn Maynard wrote: > On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 04:43:49PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote: > > > The question, for me, is whether starting to require this source is > > > useful for Debian, balanced against the cost of throwing out stuff > > > that clearly fails it, and the added maintenance costs (maintainers > > > having to track down sources). > > > > Why not? > > Suppose I want to modify a DFSG-free 2D game and I don't like the look > > of a PNG (or JPEG) sprite. > > I must have the preferred form for modification in order to fully > > exercise my freedom to adapt the game to my needs... > > Sure, I understand the benefit. I work on a game, and I have direct > experience with that problem; eg. wanting to change a piece of text inside > a set of graphic layers, forcing me to track down the original creator > and ask for the source. > > There's a cost, too, though. Source for images is often very big (eg. > layered PSDs). Source for sounds is often huge, being anything from PCM > data for simple recordings to Fruity Loops data, etc. Source data for > a small movie clip can be much bigger. Simply uploading this stuff to > the server once would take too long. I think "preferred form of modification" still works here -- if the form is too large to be easily passed around, it's clearly not preferred. This is why I drew a distinction between "creation" and "modification" before; the "created" form (huge uncompressed wavs) don't give you much, if any, more "editability" than Vorbis, in the sense that you can apply filters, cut, etc, Vorbis files just as well as wavs. And while I might spend a long time fiddling with layers in an XCF, sometimes I merge them before I save, because I expect to never edit it again. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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