Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
On Wed, 02 Mar 2005 13:16:44 +0100, Måns Rullgård <mru@inprovide.com> wrote:
[snip]
> No, for a photograph the source is the actual physical object you've
> made a picture of, so a photograph can never be free. Either this, or
> a photograph should be considered as source.
I really, really hope this is sarcasm, or reductio ad absurdum, or something.
> In your case, your best bet would probably be to provide the
> photograph without the text, or (even better) provide the image in a
> more advanced format (e.g. XCF) with the photograph and text in
> different layers.
Er, reality check? This is the software industry, not the publishing
industry. It's a pain to work around obscured data and
compression/decompression cycle artifacts when, say, fixing a spelling
error in overlaid text, but amateur image manipulators do it all the
time. If an image isn't permitted in a source tarball unless there's
a color-glossy-magazine level of professionalism in facilitating later
modifications, then you might as well toss out 98% of the GUIs in
Debian, not to mention 99.5% of closed-source software.
It's good to encourage people to use sophisticated workflow when
creating images, as when creating software. But we don't call
software non-free when it isn't developed using Extreme Programming
methodology or UML modeling, not least because these techniques are
overkill for most module-scale programming projects. And we shouldn't
call images non-free just because they weren't shot Camera RAW,
imported to a Photoshop clone, and manipulated losslessly at every
stage.
Cheers,
- Michael
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