Re: Free non-software stuff and what does it mean. [was Re: General Resolution: Force AMD64 into Sarge]
On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 04:43:49PM +0200, Francesco Poli wrote:
> > The question, for me, is whether starting to require this source is
> > useful for Debian, balanced against the cost of throwing out stuff
> > that clearly fails it, and the added maintenance costs (maintainers
> > having to track down sources).
>
> Why not?
> Suppose I want to modify a DFSG-free 2D game and I don't like the look
> of a PNG (or JPEG) sprite.
> I must have the preferred form for modification in order to fully
> exercise my freedom to adapt the game to my needs...
Sure, I understand the benefit. I work on a game, and I have direct
experience with that problem; eg. wanting to change a piece of text inside
a set of graphic layers, forcing me to track down the original creator
and ask for the source.
There's a cost, too, though. Source for images is often very big (eg.
layered PSDs). Source for sounds is often huge, being anything from PCM
data for simple recordings to Fruity Loops data, etc. Source data for
a small movie clip can be much bigger. Simply uploading this stuff to
the server once would take too long.
I would like to have that data all the time, of course, but I don't have
any strong intuition of whether forcing the issue--making people upload
several megs of source data for a small movie clip or background music
track--is worth it. (Of course, anyone is free to take up that war
individually if they like; the question is whether it's something to force
upon package maintainers, under threat-of-non-free.)
(That's a separate question from "does the SC currently mandate it?"; I think
that a strict reading of the post-2004-003, pre-004 SC may, but I'm not
arguing SC interpretation here.)
> P.S.: I apologize for not setting the Mail-Followup-To header correctly.
> I didn't manage to find out how to do it (even manually) with Sylpheed:
> if someone knows, I'd welcome suggestions (in private). TIA.
> I'm a debian-legal subscriber, so no need to Cc: me, as long as
> debian-legal itself is among the recipients.
You don't need to set MFT if you don't want a CC on Debian lists; not doing
so is list policy default. You only need to worry about setting it if you do.
--
Glenn Maynard
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