Re: source for artwork
On Sunday 23 February 2014 23:11:36 Bas Wijnen wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 08:52:20PM +0000, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> > Code and multimedia resources are not perfectly analogous. It's very
> > common for a 'final image' (be it a picture, sound, etc.) to be
> > released under a permissive license and for whatever the source
> > bits were to never be released. Unlike source and binary, such
> > end-products are almost always reusable, adaptable, modifyable.
> > Whilst it would be ideal if artists always did release source, and
> > also if the world was such that such sources were always useful and
> > the build process always repeatable, but that isn't the case. It
> > would be absurd to consider such things non-free.
>
> This is why the GPL talks about "preferred from of modification", and
> Debian, in its own GR, talks about "the form that the copyright holder
> or upstream developer would actually use for modification".
>
> If upstream would use unreleased files for making changes, then they
> are source, and not releasing them makes the generated files
> non-free.
+1
> The absurd case is when upstream would throw the original source away,
> and would also modify the generated file directly, but Debian would
> then claim that the file is non-free because there is no source. But
> we don't do that: in that case, we consider that generated file to be
> source. So we aren't being absurd. But we do require source, if it
> exists.[1]
Exactly, and this is precisely the situation that began the whole
discussion. Redeclipse was classed as non-free because of exactly this
(IMO, and I believe Bas') misunderstanding. We don't suggest that
debian should insist upon requiring whatever gimp file generated a
gradient 10 years ago, just whatever upstream is currently using to make
their final releases.
David
Reply to: