Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> If we apply this to a photograph of a circuit board, we find that
> the photograph is the source.
Quite possibly not, actually. Consider a > 2 layer PCB, FE.
> A 20 megabyte binary-only application is non-free, even if the
> author wrote and maintains it in a hex-editor. The author's
> preferred form for modification is a good metric, but not the be-all
> and end-all of whether a work provides sufficient freedom.
Why not? Why must a work be in a form that you prefer when the author
finds it ideal for their work? What makes your prefered form of
modification special over the author's?
The whole point of requiring sourcecode, as I see it, is so that users
(and Debian) have the same form that the author uses to modify the
code, so we're capable of making the same kind of modifications as the
author.
Granted, I personally wouldn't package a work that was maintained in a
binary only form using a hex-editor for Debian, if for no other reason
than the fact that *I* can't modify the thing or audit it to satisfy a
reasonable level of quality. But that's not to say that Gods or
Goddesses of machine code can't package the thing.
Don Armstrong
--
She was alot like starbucks.
IE, generic and expensive.
-- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/batch3.htm
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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