Nick Phillips wrote: > On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 09:50:13PM -0700, John H. Robinson, IV wrote:
%< snip of definitions >% > Pretty good. I would have tried to phrase it slightly differently, but you > have hit the nail on the head. > > If it's represented essentially as a sequence of 1s and 0s in a typical > digital computer, and can be modified while the machine is running, and > without moving anything except electrons around, it's software. thank you. that was the point i was trying to make. > Yes, there may be subcategories within "software" which may or may not be > relevant in various situations. In the context of the DFSG, they are not. i agree fully with the above. > > this allows us to neatly sidestep the whole issue, because _online_ > > documentation would fit in one of the above four categories of software. > > It's not a neat sidestep, it's just The Way It Is... people trying to justify > including non-free software (which happens to fall into the "documentation" > subcategory) in Debian are the ones trying to perform the neat sidestep. perhaps using sidestep was a poor choice of words. the idea is that it does not matter _what_ the sub-classifications are. the fact is that all subclassification are under the heading of ``software'' so it simply does not matter. > Oh, and I agree with Manoj; the boundaries of the subcategories are unclear. i also agree. i realised that as i wrote it. take a perl script: is it a program? is it data? is it documentation? is it all of the above at the same time? does it _really_ matter? no. it does not matter. it is still _software_. the DFSG can apply no matter how you slice the script. that was the whole point. in general: please do not get caught up on th subclassifications. they merely illustrate the point that they are all software; RFC's in electronic form included. -john
