Re: more evil firmwares found
> I'm uncomfortable with a definition of source that depends on the
> presence of clarifying comments; speaking as a Perl aficionado, it comes
> dangerously close to saying that code in languages you find unreadable
> isn't source. Am I missing something?
First, it's about what people actually use. C is normally source. But
not if it's a Yacc-generated parser. Perl is normally source, because
that's what people use, regardless whether I can read it or not. I can't
imagine people programming in an assembly language with opcodes named
opp1, opp2, etc. Either they wouldn't know what the opcodes meant or
they would use a mnemonic assembly or a macro language with real opcode
names. But if they actually were, then it would be source.
Second, it's a good thing. Debian-legal and the FSF had some objections
to graphviz because they obsfucated part of the code so it wasn't human
readable. Just because you have C code, doesn't mean you have useful
source. Again, just because it has one comment, "R.I.P.L.V.B.", doesn't
mean it's not source, as long as there's someone actually editing that
form. If someone is editing that form and it's very hard to read, then
that's life; but someone tried to make it hard to read, then it violates
the spirit of free software and shouldn't be in Debian.
--
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