On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 05:19 US/Eastern, Joe Wreschnig wrote:
IMO the GPL is purposefully vague on this point; if someone (not just the copyright holder) can show reasonably that they preferred a certain form for modification, then they've met the terms of the GPL.
The GPL says "the preferred form" not "your preferred form." The preferred form must be preferable in general, not just to a specific person, at least as I read it. We had a long thread about this in the not-to-distant past.
Otherwise, it'd be easy to get around the GPL by preferring to use a hex editor to change strings in an executable --- saves compiling time, after all.