Re: Free Art License

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2004 at 02:53:35PM +0200, Kai Blin wrote:
> It's not always clear what the preferred form of modification would be
> for a piece of media. For a picture composed of multiple layers, it's a
> version with all the layers intact and seperate, but often, in the
> process of working on a multi-layer image, the artist will combine a set
> of layers to save ram and speed up the processing. Is that image still a
> source?
> 
> Now, movies get even more tricky. A short movie clip often requires
> hours of raw material. Does everyone who wants to distribute the movie
> need to have gigabytes and gigabytes of raw movie scenes available?

The source form, for the GPL, is usually clear when you look at an
individual work (and don't try to generalize it to death): it's the
form actually used to modify.

For the first: if it's the form that would be used if the author wanted
to modify the image further, yes.

For the latter: probably not, but that isn't what determines whether
it's source or not.

I disagree that the GPL is unclear in the above cases.  You may not
necessarily want to require source for all media, though, regardless
of whether "source" is clear.

(There's been a repeated conversation wrt. source distribution and the
DFSG: what should Debian require for things like images, fonts and
movie clips?  There isn't a strong consensus, yet.)

I agree that this license is a poor choice, though.  It's very unclear
and poorly written/translated.

-- 
Glenn Maynard