On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 11:00:51PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 01:10:23AM +0100, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 04:21:35PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > 4) The freedom to change the Work for any purpose[1], to distribute > > > one's changes, and to distribute the Work in modified form. Access > > > to the form of the work which is preferred for making modifications, > > > if applicable, is a precondition for this. > > > > I find the second sentence here to be prejudicial and > > inaccurate. Mostly it leads to debates over what "the preferred form > > for modification" is, much like we've had debates over what "source > > code" is. > > Well, the concept is borrowed straight from the GNU GPL... > > > Firstly, it deals with preferences. The problem here is that different > > people have different preferences, and it is not inconceivable that > > they might prefer different forms for modification. Take a document as > > an example; do you prefer latex source, or a word document? Given your > > answer, would you contend that everybody shares this preference?[0] > > I would say that the controlling preference is that of the person who > last modified the Work and distributed it in that modified form. Anyone > downstream from that person would have to keep the "source" in that form > and the "binary" together. > > Unfortunately I can see an easy way to abuse this: Malicious proprieteer > "A" takes a Free Work and modifies its Source extensively. "A" then > distributes the modified Work and Source to complicit agent "B", who > converts the Source into a less useful format and makes a trivial > change. Agent "B" then distributes the modified Work along with the > Source in the hobbled form he can -- with some legitimacy -- claim to be > his "preferred form for modifying the work". Hmmm... Wouldn't distributing the modified Free Work, even if it's only distributed to "B", require "A" to make available the modified Free Work to third parties? Then one could start from there, and utterly disregard "B"s obfuscated version. I'm pretty sure that is the case with the GPL, not sure about other licenses. Cheers, Nick -- x----------------------------------------------------------------------x | I maintain a Zero-Tolerance policy for | | Zero-Tolerance policy maintainers. | |----------------------------------------------------------------------| | Nicolas Kratz <nick@ikarus.dyndns.org> <n_kratz@cs.uni-frankfurt.de> | x----------------------------------------------------------------------x
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