Re: GPLed software with no true source. Was: Bug#402650: ITP: mozilla-foxyproxy

[Trent Buck <trentbuck@gmail.com>]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> Consider also a text editor that automatically calculates and
> displays whitespace, while not bothering to save it to the output
> files. That is a plausable explanation for the behavior of the
> upstream author in the head of this thread.

For the record, at least one "editor" really does work like this --
the listener built into the Factor system (http://factorcode.org).
Programs are serialized into some sort of binary format that preserves
comments, but not whitespace.  A pretty-printer is responsible for
re-inserting whitespace when rendering source code for human
consumption.

While the Factor code is itself maintained as conventional text files
which are later read into the listener, it is conceivable that one
could build and maintain an application entirely interactively
(i.e. at the REPL) without ever using a plain-text format that
preserved whitespace.  You would distribute the application as a core
dump, from which the full source code could be extracted
programmatically (with whitespace automatically re-inserted by the
pretty-printer).

You can see output from the pretty printer here:

    http://factorcode.org/responder/browser/browse?vocab=sequences&word=find*

-- 
Trent Buck, Student Errant