Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo

[Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>]

Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Source code is any form of a work that allows any user who might be
> reasonably expected to modify the work to perform any modifications
> that they might be reasonably expected to perform. Occasionally a work
> may have several forms that meet this criterion.

First of all (and most telling, to my view) there's are a lot of
"reasonably" in this definition.  I think you're using these to paper
over a lot of difficult cases.  It doesn't work very well for our
purposes because different people will always have different ideas of
what's reasonable.  This is as opposed to the "preferred form" which in
the end depends on matters of fact (e.g., does the author *actually*
prefer that form?)

Secondly, it seems that your definition is going to require extensive
documentation in cases where the knowledge required to modify the code
is specialized or arcane.  Does a kernel patch require a treatise on
kernel internals to accompany the patch?  For that matter, does it
require a copy of the kernel?  After all, you can't very effectively
modify the patch without the kernel as well.

And how about which modifications we should allow for?  Is it reasonable
that I want to take the source for mutt, insert whitespace to make it
look like an ascii art dog, and put it on display?  Or use elisp code in
a high performance environment?  Or perhaps it's "reasonable" that I
take message processing code from an MTA and use it in some MUA... but
the languages are different.  Should I demand the author translate it
for me?

> The form that the author used to create a work should be irrelevent to
> freeness. 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.

I'm afraid I simply disagree here.  I'm not willing to go to an author
and say "If you write in machine code your work can never be Free."

-- 
Jeremy Hankins <nowan@nowan.org>
PGP fingerprint: 748F 4D16 538E 75D6 8333  9E10 D212 B5ED 37D0 0A03