Re: Social Contract GR's Affect on sarge
On Thu, Apr 29, 2004 at 12:11:03AM -0700, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> 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.
The DFSG explicitly mentions the GPL, BSD and Artistic licenses as
examples of licenses that satisfy its free sotware requirements.
This gives quite a bit of weight to those who would take definitions
from those licenses as examples of what the DFSG is talking about.
You are correct that this needn't be the only definition, but you are
incorrect when you claim that the GPL's definition must be rejected.
> 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.
Ted Ts'o has already explicitly pointed out that he's talking about
cases where more than the bitmap is available.
> So this is an *excellent* reason that we should not apply the GPL's
> definition of source code.
Only if you ignore both the context that's being discussed and the DFSG.
--
Raul
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