The below is very much a tangent from the minified Javascript case, and not applicable to that case.
Bas Wijnen <wij...@debian.org> writes: > Here's a rule to limit the selection a bit: a file is certainly not > source if it was originally generated from a different file, and has not > been modified. This makes files for which the source has been irrevocably lost non-DFSG-free. I don't think that's a good feature, nor is that the standard that ftpmaster has used in the past for the archive. Admittedly, that's something of an edge case, but I've uploaded PostScript files with that property in one package in the past because they were still the best available documentation for part of a software package (and called this out in debian/copyright, and had the package approved by ftpmaster). An extensive search had been done for the original source (which was originally in an internal IBM documentation generation system), and everyone including IBM was pretty sure that the source was gone forever and will never be found. I think reading "preferred form of modification" from the perspective of upstream is a useful standard because it handles some edge cases like that, and because it feels ethically consistent with free software principles. The goal is that everyone with a copy of the software should be on equal footing. The person distributing the software should have no special access to sources that those receiving the software don't get. If *no one* has access to anything better than a binary file, then possession of that binary file puts you on an equal footing with everyone else in the world, which I think is all that we can reasonably ask. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
