Re: source for artwork
On 23/02/2014 22:11, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> This is why the GPL talks about "preferred from of modification",
It isn't, because the GPL was written specifically about source code and
did not consider multimedia. So, any interpretation of the GPL in the
context of multimedia is a post-factum one. The intent was not there.
> and Debian, in its own GR, talks about "the form that the copyright
> holder or upstream developer would actually use for modification".
That's much more relevant, and difficult to interpret. I don't disagree
with you (or the GR) that if the upstream author has a preferred form
for modification not distributed with the source, they should be
encouraged to include it. If it was very clear that an upstream were
withholding a 'master source' and making updates to resources from it,
then I would probably reluctantly agree that it was a DFSG violation.
Has anyone ever believed that to be the case, I wonder?
> If upstream would use unreleased files for making changes, then they
> are source, and not releasing them makes the generated files
> non-free.
Multimedia resources (generally speaking) are much more 'fire and
forget' than source code. The sources might be unreleased, might simply
be discarded, because the output is the important bit, is not expected
to be modified much after the fact. When a multimedia resource is
adapted for some other purpose, it's very common for the modifier to
work from the end-result.
There's no doubt a disadvantage to this situation, perhaps more
multimedia resources would be re-usable across projects or adaptable
beyond the imagination of the original author(s) if more of the sources
were preserved. This would be a big cultural shift for the
multimedia-authoring communities.
> The absurd case is when upstream would throw the original source
> away, and would also modify the generated file directly,
Speaking as a multimedia author, I've done exactly this many times. I'm
author of many of the resources in the Freedoom IWAD, for example. Many
of the textures in there were composed from photographs I'd taken which
were downscaled, mapped to an 8 bit palette, etc. - the changes I made
to the source photographs were not recorded in a replay-able manner, the
source photographs are long since lost. Other textures in Freedoom are
composites from several such 'primary' textures, and that composition
takes place with the down-mixed versions.
When creating audio, the primary source material might be a selection of
different samples, or synth patches (=a particular engine and some
parameters); the synth engine might be proprietary and so only the
output could be considered free (or useful). Such things get chopped up,
filtered, etc. etc., and it's very common for several downmixes to take
place during production otherwise the DAW is simply too cluttered.
> 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]
That's good.
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