Branden Robinson said: > On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 05:36:57PM -0500, Joe Moore wrote: >> Nick Phillips said: >> > I don't think that losslessness is the right criterion, rather >> something connected to the meaning of the source and the >> achievability of the source's object. >> >> Can have useful source recovered from it, in a form that is >> <something> for modification? >> >> I can't think of the <something> to put there. It's not preferable, >> it's not easy, it's not acceptable... Any thoughts? > > Are you thinking of "suitable"?
That's a very good word. "form that is suitable for modification". Thank you. > > But the GNU GPL's definition of source code is more than that; it's not > just a "suitable" form for modification, it's the "preferred" form for > modification. I think we should preserve that. I think there are too many problems with "preferred". The author of software A prefers to work in Visual IDE 2000 (a proprietary GUI for application development). This has something that's not quite exactly like Makefiles, which only work under Visual IDE 2000. However, he can automatically generate working sources and Makefile(s) (and Makefile.in) from his preferred .ide format, by clicking the "Publish" button. Why would the .ide files be the "preferred form" if no Free Software developer can read them? >> This requirement, while totally inadequate from a legal perspective, >> also explains the foreign language: Speakers of the foreign language >> get useful source from the transformations, and a second translation >> can get useful source back into the original language. > > I don't agree with this analysis at all. Translations from one natural > language to another are very lossy things. Ever read Shakespeare > without using the footnotes? How about Chaucer? Magnify that problem > by ten. I'm not talking about literature, but I do see your point. On the other hand, (translated) Chaucer is still meaningful and pretty good literature in both French and modern english. It may not be identical to the original, but the better translations are closer than the bad ones. Another thing would be source comments: There's been a lot of work with i18n of executable messages, but that doesn't help foreign developers to improve the source code. Translating the (english) //comments into (for example) elbonian may not help the original author (and may make it exceptionally hard for him to maintain the code a few years later), but it shouldn't be forbidden by the license, when it's exactly the sort of thing Free Software is supposed to promote. If an elbonian programmer translates the author's comments and documentation into elbonian for his local hacker's club, and they improve the original software, are they obligated to have their improvements translated back to english? --Joe
