Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Scripsit Francesco Poli <frx@firenze.linux.it>

> But in the case of the photographer Laura, if she thinks (in good faith)
> that she has the JPEG only, then JPEG is her preferred form for
> modification. When she finds out that another format existed, she may or
> may not change her mind about what is her preferred form for
> modification. In this case source code may change format.

I think basing a definition that strictly on internal psychological
properties of the author is going to lead to madness. It is not easily
observable and may cause the status of a work to fluctuate
unpredictably between free and non-free as the author changes his
mind.

Note that the GPL does not define that it is the author that does the
preferring. The "what would the author do" principle is good for
defining the easy cases where no further analysis is necessary:

1) On one side, if the author deliberately refuses to let us have and
   distribute the form of the work _he_ keeps around for the purposes
   of editing it later, then we should not consider the work free.

2) Conversely, we cannot reasonably accuse the author of releasing
   his work under non-free conditions if he *does* give us every form
   he himself used to create it, and allows us to distribute them
   under otherwise free conditions.

Between these two applications of the rule is a grey area. It is not a
particularly large grey area, but it is there, and pretending that it
doesn't exist at all (say, by clinging to an interpretation that says
we must keep mind-probing the author at intervals to find out whether
the work stays free) will not help anybody. As with other grey areas
we have to fall back to other and more fuzzy criteria here, such as:
"Which form would a _reasonable_ person with the skills to understand
and appreciate the work prefer for modifying?". This seems to be one
of the points Matthew is making, and I think he is right in making
that particular point.

(Which doesn't mean that I in any way agree with his apprarent
attempts to use that point as a lever to shoehorn works that fail
condition (1) above into Debian main).

-- 
Henning Makholm                             "In my opinion, this child don't
                                       need to have his head shrunk at all."