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Re: Debian-approved creative/content license?



On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:01:02 -0400 Joe Smith wrote:

> 
> "Francesco Poli" <frx@firenze.linux.it> wrote in message 
> 20070328010013.08c6f721.frx@firenze.linux.it">news:20070328010013.08c6f721.frx@firenze.linux.it...
> >Exactly, and in some cases an author/maintainer *may* prefer to
> >modify a lossy-compressed form directly.
> >In some other cases, he/she *may* prefer working on uncompressed data
> >and recompress afterward...
> 
> Yes, I'm really starting to question the idea of source.
> 
> It seems to me that the "preferred form of modification" seems to
> depend on  the desired modification.

It can change form after someone makes some kind of modifications (think
of someone who automatically translates a Fortran program to C++ and
then goes on modifying the C++ code: in that case the source form for
the modified program is really C++ code!).
But, as long as you consider the "original" work, there is one form
which is preferred above the others, maybe because other suitable forms
can be generated from it (in the example of the Fortran program, the
source form for the original work is Fortran code: in case you want to
make the modifications that makes you prefer the C++ form, you can
always generate the latter from Fortran...).

> 
> Since this is Debian, I will use the example of Toy Story. Let us say
> that  Steve Jobs inexplicably decides he wants to release Toy Story as
> a  open-source movie, and manages to convince the rest of the people
> at Disney  that this was a good idea.

It *is* a good idea, but this is another issue...  ;-)

> 
> Thinking about only the video portion, what would we call source?
> 
> I can see three answers to this:
> 1. The model files, lighting, and animation information. This can be
> used to  regenerate the movie.
> 2. The original raw frames of the rendered video.
> 3. The compressed final video stream.
[...]
> So which one(s) should be considered source?

I would prefer having the 3D models and related stuff and I guess the
original authors would use that form, should they make modifications to
the movie.
Of course, for simple modifications, I could decide to use the
compressed video stream: in those cases the source for the *modified*
work might be the compressed video...

I don't see any inconsistency in that.

The fact that rebuilding Toy Story from source (that is, from 3D models)
requires huge resources is a problem for the original authors too, and
has little to do with source definition.
Have you ever rebuilt the VTK library[1] on a 400 MHz Pentium II
machine?  I can say (from personal experience) that it takes quite a
long time, but that doesn't mean that VTK source is not C++ code...

[1] http://packages.debian.org/unstable/source/vtk


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..................................................... Francesco Poli .
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