On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 23:50, John H. Robinson, IV wrote: > Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 16:38:43 -0700, John H Robinson, IV <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > said: > > > > > as a mostly passive observer at this point, the only data we are > > > missing is a clear working definition to separate out Software, > > > Data, and Documentation. > > > > My feeling is that there may not be any such clear cut > > distinction. > > i am going to try to take a stab at it: > > hardware: physical computing devices > software: logical information stored by hardware devices that can be > used for computation. > > this allows us to break software into three (or more) areas: > > program: software that provides instructions to hardware > > data: input to software > > documentation: information about software or data > > Drawer 'O': software that does not fit in the above three categories. > > this allows us to neatly sidestep the whole issue, because _online_ > documentation would fit in one of the above four categories of software. > Debian Will Remain 100% Free Software[0]. so if we never include dead- > tree documentation as part of Debian, then we can easily and safely > apply the DFSG to any bit of program/data/documentation/Drawer 'O' that > is ever uploaded to the archive.
If I have an IA32 binary, running on my home system is clearly a 'program' (if we ignore that some processors do translation of the "native" instruction set to something else). But if I'm running it on Bochs on a PPC or SPARC, it's now data to Bochs, a program. My Perl script is a program, running on a VM. But it's also data to the Perl interpreter. CWEB and other literate or semi-literate programming environments allow you to write documentation and code that are mixed together. PS, PDF, and LaTeX allow you to write documentation in a Turing-complete language. HTML/XML is a language for programming a web browser's display engine, although it's not Turing-complete. All streams of bits are "Drawer 'O'" software, depending on how you use it. Please, read the archives. Then, even if someone does come up with a good delineation between software and non-software bits, I still haven't seen any convincing arguments that non-software doesn't need the same kind of freedoms as software. -- Joe Wreschnig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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