On Wed, Feb 02, 2000 at 12:49:36PM +0000, Terry Dawson wrote:
> If programming is a means of artistic expression, surely software must
> be an art form.
Not every program is a work of art, by any means. The analogy to
architecture is pretty strong: (in an ideal world) the primary concerns
are functionality, reliability, and whether the finished product is any
good. The art of making the structure elegantly support its stresses
or whatever is there, but it'll only be appreciated by an elite few,
and the building itself won't really be considered artistic by most.
The only real construction `art' are, say, things like the Eiffel tower,
or the Statue of Liberty, and suchlike. They're not particularly common,
by any means. Things like, perhaps, befunge or intercal might rate as
actual programming art in a similar way, with perhaps a little less
elegance.
> For some time on the LDP mailing list I've put the argument that there
> should not be a difference between licenses for documentation and
> licenses for software.
Which they shouldn't be: generally you want to documentation to go with
the software, because that's how it's most useful.
> I'm yet to be presented with a compelling reason for treating them
> differently from a license perspective.
The problem with this is that most people aren't working from a
"intellectual property isn't" perspective. Debian's webpages are Debian's,
why should anyone else get any access to them? Sure, viewing them is a
good idea, but why should they be redistributable? Well, I guess mirrors
are okay. But what about modifiable? Well, translations count, but that's
pretty limited modification. Why should we allow more?
Arguing that anything else is hypocritical kinda misses the point. We're
about distributing an operating system, programs, stuff like that. Web
pages are completely ancillary, and they're already good enough.
The counter-argument is to prevent people ripping off our work, or
something. For example, some unscrupulous dot-com could take all the
Debian stuff, setup www.debian.foo.xy in their country, and confuse
newbies into thinking that they're the official site. And everyone knows
that Debian would do *anything* to avoid confusing newbies, so this is
a completely unacceptable situation.
I mean, it seems like the world would be a better place if we didn't have
the MPAA going all jackbooted because they want to stop people copying
DVDs in ten years time, and if we could just say `well if it takes $30
to get a CD from <foo>, but nothing to get an mp3 from <bar>...' and do
the capitalist, free-market thing, and so on the world would be pretty
neat. And we've even gotten a proof of concept now in the software
industry, at least in the short term.
I dunno. It'd be nice to have a GNU manifesto -style document that applied
to music and books and everything, as well as just to software. Telling
us in persuasive tones how just like programmers could be paid for
services, bands could be paid for shows, or something.
That said, it'd probably make some sense for us to allow people to make
arbitrary modifications, presumably with the usual "but actually mention
that this is a modified thing clearly an' all, y' hear?" clause. I mean,
piping webpages through
sed 's,http://www.debian.org/,http://localhost/debian/,g'
probably isn't something we particularly want to restrict, and at least
the nasty dot-com scenario probably isn't particularly more likely to
happen if the web pages can be legally copied or not.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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