Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
On Thu, 03 Mar 2005, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> I don't think /my/ preferred form of modification is more special
> than the author's, but if nobody but the author is in a reasonable
> position to alter the code then I don't think that's free.
If this is because the author is withholding information, then I
agree... but if it's just because no one else can think in machine
code, than I disagree.
> Free software is supposed to give us independence from the author -
> that's not possible if the work is effectively unmodifiable by
> anyone else.
If I could find some way of specifying this without going the road of
the GFDL, where it unecessarily restricts the license to very specific
forms of sourcecode, I would consider it. However, the attempts that
I've seen always seem to outlaw rather useful applications that the
GPL's definition appears to allow.
> Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I'd disagree - I think we want sourcecode because we want to be able
> to modify the work. That's subtly different to what you're
> suggesting, and there are works that could fall in one and not the
> other. From the point of view of modifiability, I don't think the
> author should be considered special.
But who gets to decide? To someone who thinks in machinecode, perl[1]
may be just as difficult to modify as machinecode is for me. I can
modify the code, and anyone possessing the skillset that I have can
modify the code. There's nothing I possess that can possibly be
distributed that would help them modify the software that they don't
have.
> As I said before, I think I have a fundamentally different take on
> why we want source code to the general view here.
Yeah, I think we both agree on the main point of why we want
sourcecode, we just differ on whether or not we will let the author
use things that a "normal person"[2] wouldn't be capable of modifing
that the author (and those with an equivalent skillset) would be.
Frankly, there really shouldn't be any works that fall into this
narrow region[3] being distributed in Debian anyway, on the purely
technical grounds that the maintainer isn't capable of maintaining the
code.
Don Armstrong
1: To pick my favorite, but much maligned, language
2: Whatever that means
3: Oh yes, firmware. (Rhetorical) Why are we distributing code that we
can't maintain?
--
"The trouble with you, Ibid" he said, "is that you think you're the
biggest bloody authority on everything"
-- Terry Pratchet _Pyramids_ p146
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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