Stephen Frost escribió:
... And it has been proved that there are free editors for them. Problem solved, we can keep our fonts :) Except for transcompilation to textual form, PNGs and GIFs *are* the preferred and only form for modification. JPEGs can not even be modified without substantial change anyway ...* Theodore Ts'o (tytso@mit.edu) wrote:That's what I'm contending. For compressed PCF or truetype fonts I'd bemore inclined to say that's the 'preferred form for modification'.
I have done quite some firmware programming, and i used just a plain assembler (and just because the opcodes are a bit more tedious and error-prone to write directly in hex). Provided the instruction set for the particular /programmable device/ is documented somewhere, the hex dump of the firmware can become the "preferred form for modification", specially if no free assemblers are available or the code snippet is small enough ( initializing some registers and the like ).I'm less inclined to say the same about firmware and a hex editor though not entirely opposed to it either. Especially if the firmware is just assembled assembly for a specific processor that could be disassembled. I'm not very familiar with firmware though, is virtually all firmware compiled C code or is alot of it assembly or what?
People, please... ask for a clarification from the FSF or something if necessary, but this "preferred form for modification" only applies to *software* not *data* ( I am implicitly agreeing that firmware constitutes software ). BTW, IMHO it is yet to be proved that something which is distributed under the GPL can't be distributed as it was received... probably Debian-legal should get the FSF to provide an statement or something... or maybe we *all* need to re-read the licenses we consider DFSG-free.
J.L.P.S.: Please keep in mind: our priorities are *our users* and *free software*, in this order. And nothing in the latest GR changes this.