On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 04:27:01PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote: > So in this case, if you had someone else take a GPLed work, modify it > it, compiled it and give it to you, then you made some trivial > modifications to the binary, and then only distributed the unmodified > binary as source you would be ok? > > I'd argue very strongly that you wouldn't be ok, and I would suspect > that the authors of the GNU GPL would feel similarly. Intermediate > modification of a work in a different form from the original form is > not a valid method to get around the prefered source requirement.
If that's *really* my preferred form for modification. It probably isn't, and making a couple trivial modifications to the program is probably not sufficient to indicate that it is. A more likely scenario: you write a program in Pascal, and give it to me. Pascal is a useless language, so I programmatically convert it to C (a fairly simple task), and then spend a few weeks improving the program in C. The Pascal code may be useful for reference, but it is no longer the source to the resulting work, neither by my instinctive opinion of "source" nor by the "preferred form for modification" metric. I don't believe I would be in violation of the GPL to distribute the resulting binaries with only the C code, and not the Pascal code. I believe this is a strength of this definition of "source", not a weakness. > Still, you should strongly consider distributing it, especially if > this lossless encoding is necessary to make further modificatins to > the work in place. For example, if you were to make a different cut of > the video, would you go back to the original lossless encoding? Or > would you use an intermediate encoding? > > This will enable subsequent people to actually perform the > modifications necessary to improve your work. Consider how your > collaborators would be able to function if you fell off the face of > the planet and took your lossless encoding with you? Not feasible is not feasible. I can reasonably distribute five megs of video; I can not reasonably distribute five hundred megs of video. The cost vs. benefit of including massive source videos for a compressed video is infintessimal compared to that of including source code for a program, since the cost of distributing the source is so extreme. (And I live in the US, with an unmetered cable modem; the cost is orders of magnitude higher in some parts of the world.) Similarly, I can reasonably check a few megs of video into CVS, but I certainly can't check in a few hundred megs (and the situation is much worse with Subversion, which essentially can't delete old revisions). I certainly wouldn't GPL the video. All that would do would prevent anyone from mirroring it--getting mirrors for an interesting five or ten megabyte video is a lot harder when you tack on a "... and you must make these hundreds of megabytes of source available as well". -- Glenn Maynard
