On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 10:49:26PM +0900, Seo Sanghyeon wrote:
1. How do you define "source code" yourself?
Like pornography, I know "source code" when I see it. There may be some edge cases where not everyone agrees what constitutes source code, but porn is like that too. Where do you draw the line between a tasteful nude and exploitive smut?
2. I think that people have different ideas of what "source code" means. Do you agree? Are there significant disagreements regarding this issue within the Debian Project?
I haven't seen any major disagreements.
6. Which of the following satisfies DFSG #2? What is the general principle? Or should it be case-by-case?
You've opened a can of worms with your extremely thorough and excellent list. :-) I think it is better left for the community to decide. I've noticed the tendency over time is toward greater freedom and openness, and I think that is a good thing.
* ELF binary without C source * Java class file without Java source (This is reasonably decompilable: cf. jad package) * Python bytecode without Python source (This is easily decompilable: cf. decompyle package) * Binary firmware data * configure script without configure.in * C source generated by Bison without .y source * In general, automatically generated source without good way to regenerate (But generated file may include every line of original source, perhaps as comments "This is generated from original line blah blah") * Prebuilt HTML file without LaTeX source (cf. python-doc) * Prebuilt CHM (Compiled HTML) file without source HTML (This can be extracted: cf. chmlib, but perhaps not indexing information) * True type font made with autotracing without original bitmaps (cf. autotrace, potrace) * Opening book for board games without editing tools (gnuchess-book and gnugo package have opening books, but these are in well-known PGN and SGF format, so this is a hypothetical question) * Binary encoded data without source or encoding tools (Wordlist, thesarus, etc. cf. bug #241279) * Automatically generated character set encoding table without tools originally used for generation. (This rarely changes, so it's possible even the upstream doesn't have tools anymore) * Dump of neural network data without training data or without exact method to duplicate the network * In general, statistical data gathered from large amount of samples (I am not sure, but I think Mozilla's "Universal Charset Detection" uses character distribution table of East Asian languages gathered from large samples) * JPEG image without higher quality image from which it was compressed (JPEG is lossy) * Bitmap image merged from many layers without layer information (e.g. GIMP's XCF format) * Bitmap image without corresponding vector format (e.g. SVG) * MP3 compressed sound without original sound source (MP3 encoders patent-encumbered? Also MP3 is lossy) * Ogg Vorbis compressed sound without original sound source (Ogg is lossy) * FLAC compressed sound without original sound source (FLAC is not lossy) * Offline version of documentations in Wiki or FAQ CGI script, etc. downloaded by, say, wget, without original Wikitext or FAQ database dump * Binary image of programming environment used for bootstrapping purpose, but not exactly correspond to environment to be bootstrapped (Think Lisp, Smalltalk, etc.) * What else?
--It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.
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