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. 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] Thanks, Bas [1] Well, ok, we only "strongly recommend" it.
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