Re: GNU FDL 1.2 draft comment summary posted, and RFD
Steve Langasek <vorlon@netexpress.net> wrote:
> OTOH, "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is not
> always the same thing as "original source form of the work", because
> *preferences* are subjective. I may receive a copylefted document in
> LaTeX format, but because I'm not comfortable with working in that
> format, I use one of the many available tools to convert it to XML (or
> God forbid, PDF) before making my own changes to it. Should I then be
> obliged to redistribute the original LaTex document that I received
> under a copyleft license?
>
> Analogy in the coding world: if there's a particular function (C file,
> library, etc. -- whatever the basic unit is that we'd like to consider)
> that's being poorly optimized by the compiler, and I reimplement it in
> assembly because I know better, should I be required to distribute the
> original C source, or can I toss it? Personally, I think anyone who
> takes a piece of portable code and modifies it to be
> architecture-dependent is a jerk, but I'm not sure that opinion should
> have the force of law.
You have modified the original such that the preferred form for
modifications has changed. People do this all the time (e.g. recoding
a Perl project in Python). I don't think that there is any ambiguity
here.
Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu
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