On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 14:59, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > 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. While for many things there's an almost-definite preferred form (C source over binaries, HTML over PDF, and so on), in many cases, there is no generally preferred form. .doc versus .abw? JPEG versus PNG? XM versus MOD? Or for an extreme case, HTML 3 versus XHTML 4, or DocBook SGML / DocBook XML? > We had a long thread about this in the > not-to-distant past. I remember that thread; I still believe your interpretation is flawed. > 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. You'd have to actually do modifications like that for it to be the preferred form. And if you actually do modifications with a hex editor in an executable, then that does in fact become source. If I hack the hell out of some yacc/lex output and put that in my program, the yacc/lex files aren't the source anymore, the C code is. Same deal with hacking a binary directly. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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