Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
Luke Schierer wrote:
On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 01:20:31PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Why does it depend on what the upstream author is using as source? How
does that affect the recipient's ability to modify the work?
because the recipient has the same ability to modify the source that
the author does, subject only to their differing abilities. Which is
really what free software is about.
Your interpretation of "free software" is plain wrong:
you are confusing "ability to modify" with "legal right to modify".
Good hackers have the "ability to modify" the binary code in proprietary
programs and OSs , but they lack the "legal right to modify"
With Open Source Software and Free Software, they have
"ability to modify" and "legal right to modify" the binary code
and the source code as well (as long as they abide by the license)
It isn't about ability to modify
in absolute terms, it is you've always had that, it is about having
the same access (whether that is truely "easy" or not is irrelevent)
as the author.
IMHO , your argument about "access" is wrong as well:
the original author may have better "access" to the code than
the other people, and still the product may be OpenSource.
Example : the original author (OA)
may have access to a dedicated CVS/SVN/you-choose
repository containing much more information about the code than
you have access to: older versions, patches, etc etc.
Yet, if the OA puts a tar.gz in a public site, with
a clear statement with enough source code as to build the product, that
is fine.
In no place it is written that the original author must open the original
repository to the public: he will continue to work on the code
using his/her own repository, and you will not be granted access to it,
and nothing in any GPL or other license will say the opposite.
a.
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