Re: Let's stop feeding the NVidia cuckoo
Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com> wrote: [...]
> > The odds are that we always have something that it is possible
> > to modify *somehow* by necessity of packaging, so why do you
> > think we need to worry about that and ignore upstream?
> Because taking upstream's preferred form for modification leads us to
> believe that it's possible for large binary objects to be source, even
> if nobody other than the author can be realistically expected to modify
> them. You can argue that that meets the GPL, but I don't think you can
> reasonably argue that it's free software. The DFSG requirement for
> source is inspired by one of the FSF's four freedoms:
>
> "The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
> (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
>
> Providing something that is the preferred form for modification does not
> necessarily make it possible to study how the program works or to adapt
> it to your needs.
In the hand-crafted binary example, it would be *possible* to
do both of those. Notice that the freedom doesn't require it
to be easy. It's near the border, about where the nv driver was
accused of being: free but hard to hack. I don't really see how
you can blanket-ban them from main. As pointed out elsewhere,
practical concerns usually keeps us away from these edge cases
and the other few we'll argue about. How are you about the nv
driver now?
> > [...]
> >> > Again, I am seriously worried that I agree with Andrew Suffield. :-/
> [...] It seemed an odd thing for you to say.
I do not consider him a good example to follow. Then again, me neither.
--
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Subscribed to this list. No need to Cc, thanks.
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