Re: GNU FDL 1.2 draft comment summary posted, and RFD

[Walter Landry <wlandry@ucsd.edu>]

Anthony DeRobertis <asd@suespammers.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-06-13 at 22:28, Branden Robinson wrote:
> 
> > If the consumer can apply a transformation to what he recives that
> > perfectly restores the original, I don't see a problem.
> 
> I assume here that you mean the consumer can, given the source, recreate
> whatever he received from the distributor. 
> 
> There are a couple of things with publication that need to be
> considered:
> 
>    1) The publisher probably has very expensive, very high-quality type
>       faces.
>  
>    2) The publisher probably has very exepensive, very high-quality
>       software and equipment to do color matching and printing [if this
>       is, e.g., a work of art].
> 
>    3) The publisher may do various hand-tweaks of the output, such as
>       adjusting hinting, kerning, etc.
> 
>    4) Probably a bunch more things in this vein. I'm not in publishing.
> 
> None of the results of these would be stored in the 'preferred form' of
> making changes. Yet, they are required to reproduce the work received
> from the publisher. Other than the hardware, should they be required to
> distribute the software?

The GPL would say that you only have to distribute whatever software
is not normally included with the OS.  Yes, people might have to buy
expensive equipment like, say, a computer, to reproduce expensive
effects.  I don't see this as a problem.

As for the specific example 3), this sounds like they are making the
output the preferred form for modification.  If they distribute the
output and the source, then they're fine.  Collectively, they make up
the preferred form for modification.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry@ucsd.edu


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