On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 09:24:21AM +0200, Henning Makholm wrote: Please respect Debian list policy and my Mail-Followup-To header, and don't Cc me.
> > An XML score satisfies all these requirements as a way of > > representing music. > We're not talking about music; we're talking about *sound > recordings*. Actually, we're just talking about embedding sound in a GNU FDL document. Music, in case you hadn't noticed, is one form sound takes. > All the XML scores in the world will not allow me to > recreate a particular sound recording (made with real live musicians, > in the case it contains music). Therefore, an XML score is not > source. All the C code in the world won't let you recreate the last build I did either, unless I also give you the compiler I used. Big deal. > > Samples and recordings are more difficult, mainly because the concept of > > "revision" doesn't really exist, per se. One possibility is just to do > > a hex dump -- it's as straightforwardly editable with a hex editor as > > _anything_ is, after all > Any opaque format is straightforwardly editable with a hex editor. Well, no, it's not. The question is what changes do you want to make. If you want to change the location of two icons in a program, I don't think you're going to be able to do that if I give you a hexdump of an ELF executable. OTOH, I don't think there are any "revisions" you can make to any sound file that you can't also make with a text editor to a suitable text dump of a WAV file. > > Simply being able to cut up the sound and insert your own pre-recorded sound > > effects is probably enough to satisfy that requirement actually > Says who? So you call it free even if you can't remove something? Seems pretty easy to me to delete a tag and its contents form an XML file. > > * you can revise it with a text editor easily enough > Only for certain kinds of changes. That's not enough. Really? How do you remove all the buffer overflows from mozilla with a text editor? A lot of analysis, study, and tedious editing, no? Same thing with most of the edits you want to do to a sound file. Some things are easy, some things aren't. Big deal. > > to be "is Anthony My name" is easy, eg; > Not without losing any semblance of sensible prosody. Again, so what? The sorts of revisions you can do with sound are fundamentally limited; that you can't easily do everything conceivable means nothing at all. > > * the format's been designed to make it as easy as possible to modify, > > not arranged to thward anything > "As easy as possible" is still not easy enough to quialify as "possible". That's completely irrelevant too: the question that's answering is whether the formats specifically designed to thwart modifications. It's not. > > The questions at hand here are can you license sound stuff under the > > GNU FDL, and, if not, can the GNU FDL possible be DFSG-free. I think > > the answer to the first question is yes, and, even ignoring that, I'm > > not really convinced the answer to the second is no. > If it is not possible to license sound under GFDL (which I believe it > is not), then the GFDL says that I must not make a modification of > the work that consists of reading it aloud on a sound recording. I > think that's quite easily non-free. That's wrong too: that would merely be an opaque copy which is entirely allowable, as long as you distribute a transparent copy as well. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``Dear Anthony Towns: [...] Congratulations -- you are now certified as a Red Hat Certified Engineer!''
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