On Mon, 12 Mar 2007 12:51:50 -0700 (PDT) Ken Arromdee wrote: > On Mon, 12 Mar 2007, Francesco Poli wrote: > > When the uncompressed form is really huge, maybe even the upstream > > maintainer thinks it's inconvenient to work with. In that case, > > he/she may prefer to modify the compressed form directly: hence, the > > source code is really the compressed form! > > That doesn't follow. The uncompressed form may be inconvenient > because it's dozens of times the size of the video and he has limited > bandwidth. Or because he's releasing 40 videos but he only edits them > one at a time, and has enough disk space for an edit (since he edits > them one at a time), but not for all 40 at once. Or because the > uncompressed form fits on 15 DVDs and the compressed form fits on one > and copying 15 extra DVDs is too much work. Please note that I wrote "maybe": I *didn't* mean to state that *whenever* the uncompressed form is really huge, it's not source. However, the bigger it is, the higher the probability that it becomes inconvenient not only to distribute, but also to handle for modifying the work. Anyway, whenever some form of a work is the preferred one for modifications (i.e.: source form), but, at the same time, is inconvenient to distribute, well, the work is inconvenient to distribute in a Free manner! This is an unfortunate technical obstacle to freeing works and should be removed by technology improvements: we should not surrender and lower our freeness standards in order to accept sourceless works as if they were Free. Hope this clarifies. -- http://frx.netsons.org/progs/scripts/refresh-pubring.html Need to refresh your keyring in a piecewise fashion? ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == C979 F34B 27CE 5CD8 DC12 31B5 78F4 279B DD6D FCF4
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