Glenn Maynard wrote: >That is, on principle I agree with Andrew, but in practice I'm leaning >to agree with you (but I'm not personally convinced strongly either way). >In practice, Debian has never fought the source-code battle for images, >fonts, sounds, movie clips, etc., and it's not clear that it's in its >best interests to begin doing so. > >However, in practice, GR 2004-003 (deferred) is clear in saying that >everything in Debian must follow the DFSG; the only way I can see around >the implication that all of Debian must have source is playing word >games with the word "program"; we should be able to do better than that. > >In short, I strongly agree with the Project's collective opinion[1] that >all data--images, sounds, fonts--must be under a Free license. I'm not >so convinced of requiring source for those, however. > >[1] as expressed in 2004-003 > > > If upstream supplies source in the upstream, as per Andrews definition, then I think that is OK. But if they don't, then that should not constitute violation of DFSG.
We *need* a definition of "program" in the DFSG. This is the only way to fix the ambiguity. >>I'm cc'ing -legal because I need to know who is right on this. Are we >>going to start harassing upstream over "sources" to jpegs and oggs? Or >>data, since it is inherently binary and thus non-readable by a human in >>raw form, source in itself? That is, if, >> >>1. data format is known, and >>2. data is under a free license according to DFSG >> >>then such data is free according to DFSG. >> >> > >ELF is a known data format, but it's very rarely source; a typical ELF >will not pass the DFSG without the real-world source code equivalent. I >hope we're all agreed on that, at least. > > Of course. When I said `data`, I meant data as in 'inherently binary', ie. inherently in non-human readable format during all stages of its modifications. Software is not inherently binary by that definition. -- Building your applications one byte at a time http://www.galacticasoftware.com
