Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge

[tb@becket.net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> Well, there is certainly a double-standard going on about fonts.
> People have argued that since there exists open source tools for
> editing fonts, font files should be considered their own source, even
> if Font Foundries have their own preferred source formats and use
> propietary tools to create font files via a compilation process.

We do not have a definition of "source code" in the DFSG.  You wanted
to import the GPL's definition, and that's a bug.

A reasonable definition might be (*might* be) something like whatever
is necessary to usefully and constructively take advantage of the
freedom to modify the thing.

For binary programs, the ability to edit the file with binhex is *not*
an ability to usefully or constructively modify the thing.

But for a font, the ability to tweak the bitmap might well be, because
there is nothing more to a rendered font than the bitmap; for a
binary program, there is a logical structure to the instructions which
it is exceedingly difficult to change without the higher level
language from which it was generated.

So this is an *excellent* reason that we should not apply the GPL's
definition of source code.

Thomas