On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Don Armstrong wrote:
Yes, but this isn't something that a sane upstream is ever going to do, so it's not worth discussing much. [And frankly, if it's something that upstream does do, one should strongly question whether Debian should actually be distributing the work in question anyway.]
It can actually happen. Consider the case where someone edits an audiovisual work using uncompressed video and audio files, then deletes them when he's done because they take up too much space. Plenty of sane people will do this. (This situation also results in works which cannot be GPLed, if the original creator still has the uncompressed files and refuses to distribute them due to lack of bandwidth. GPL may not work too well when the source code is hundreds of times the size of the binary.)