Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OTOH, "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is not > always the same thing as "original source form of the work", because > *preferences* are subjective. I may receive a copylefted document in > LaTeX format, but because I'm not comfortable with working in that > format, I use one of the many available tools to convert it to XML (or > God forbid, PDF) before making my own changes to it. Should I then be > obliged to redistribute the original LaTex document that I received > under a copyleft license? > > Analogy in the coding world: if there's a particular function (C file, > library, etc. -- whatever the basic unit is that we'd like to consider) > that's being poorly optimized by the compiler, and I reimplement it in > assembly because I know better, should I be required to distribute the > original C source, or can I toss it? Personally, I think anyone who > takes a piece of portable code and modifies it to be > architecture-dependent is a jerk, but I'm not sure that opinion should > have the force of law.
You have modified the original such that the preferred form for modifications has changed. People do this all the time (e.g. recoding a Perl project in Python). I don't think that there is any ambiguity here. Regards, Walter Landry [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
