On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 10:05:38PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote: > Well, I'm a bit surprised, here. > You were the proposal A proposer in GR 2004-004 and the rationale seems > to state that your understanding of both versions of the Social Contract > (the one previous GR 2004-003 and the new one as amended by GR 2004-003 > itself) implies that DFSG apply to everything we distribute in main, not > only programs. > See http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004
> Now you seem to claim that DFSG#2 does not apply to non-programs, > because its explanation says "program". Yes. These two concepts are not in contradiction. > Are you implying that a 2-clause-BSD licensed manual can be distributed > in main in PDF format, if the LaTeX source (preferred by upstream for > making modifications to it) is kept secret and not available? I think it's sucky and we're better off distributing the LaTeX source as well if we can get access to it, but I'm not convinced that this should be a release-critical bug. I simply do not believe that LaTeX -> PDF conversion constitutes a technical barrier to modification to the same degree as compilation of C/C++/Java source to native assembly/bytecode, because the amount of higher-level markup information that's lost differs by an order of magnitude. You can take a PDF and usefully extract the entire text back out of it (even if people set cheesy "no copy" flags in their PDFs, thanks to non-crippled readers), and all that's missing is the typesetting markup; but decompiling a binary gives you none of the text of the original higher-level source. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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