On Tue, 13 May 2025 at 22:00:01 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
Second, in the specific case of *software*, I think our current compromise is over-broad in what it protects. Software is frequently *not* a deeply meaningful creative human communication that reflects its creator. It's often algorithmic, mechanical, and functional, attributes that, elsewhere in our copyright compromise, define works that are not protected by copyright. I don't consider protecting every software program as strongly as a novel or painting to be morally justifiable.
I think this is a good thing to think about for a lot of the content that we distribute, and how we apply FOSS principles to it. I don't think this is a binary, I think it's a spectrum, with purely functional things at one end and purely artistic/expressive things at the other. We could say that engineering is closer to the functional end of that scale than art is, but neither are actually at the extremes - a lot of engineering has some amount of creativity and even aesthetics involved (a bridge needs to stay up, but a *good* bridge also doesn't look ugly) and a lot of art requires some amount of necessary pragmatism to make it something that can exist in the real world (it doesn't matter how beautiful your statue would hypothetically be if it collapses under its own weight).
Many of the executable programs we ship are mostly functional and only a little bit artistic/expressive, but for example the recently-introduced Ceratopsian themes for Debian 13 are mostly artistic and only a little bit functional. I don't think we should take it for granted that the same self-imposed rules for both of those are necessarily appropriate: the closer something is to the functional end of the scale, the more important I think the DFSG's principles are for it.
One of the reasons I'm more comfortable with packaging non-Free games than on other classes of non-Free software is that I consider games - and in particular the non-executable parts of games, like the levels and textures and so on - to be closer to the artistic/expressive end of that scale than the pragmatic/functional end. Game engines and scripts are more pragmatic/functional than the non-executable data they act on, but not as much so as for example the text editor I'm using to compose this email; and as a result I'm more willing to tolerate missing source code for a game than missing source code for a text editor.
(As with elsewhere in this thread, I'm carefully avoiding saying "software" because of the ambiguity between "software is any work in a digital format" and "software specifically means executable programs".)
smcv