[cc-community] [cc-licenses] Most important feature: GPL-compatibility
Anthony
osm at inbox.org
Fri Jan 27 08:08:04 EST 2012
On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 7:49 AM, drew Roberts <zotz at 100jamz.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 26 January 2012 22:56:42 Ben Finney wrote:
>> I think the answer is clearly “the poem itself”, i.e. the specific
>> characters that form the poem.
>
> Again, perhaps I need to pick slightly better examples but are you guys trying
> to miss the point?
>
> So, the original paper version was in fancy calligraphy with an ornamented
> border of hand drawn leaves.
>
> Each copy is degraded from the copy before it or from the original in the
> first instance. All done with old fashioned photo copiers. No one has access
> to equipment to digitize the thing at any point.
>
> So you either pass on "the original/copy you got" and keep the degraded copy
> for yourself or you keep "the original/copy you got" and pass on the degraded
> copy but one cannot leave oneself and the one passed on to in an equal
> position to further work with the work.
Really I think you're missing the point. If I copy a RedHat CD, and
the copy gets damaged in a way that causes some bits to flip, the
source code is still the source code. It's not the original CD. It's
not the duplicate CD. The medium is irrelevant.
Or, perhaps a closer analogy: If I write the source code to a program
on a piece of paper and put it under the GPL, the source code is the
source code.
> But isn't that the whole point? That source cannot be given and a license
> requiring that it be given would not work.
In the case of the poem it seems to me that the source can be given.
It can even be given in machine-readable form.
> And further consider the idea of a poem in fancy calligraphy with handdraw
> illustrations and a hand drawn border. All on one piece of paper. One "whole
> work" possibly made up of various sub works all existing only on this one
> piece of paper.
Yes, that's more difficult. In fact, I'd say the analogy to software
breaks down, because the source (the poem, the illustrations, the, for
lack of a better term, "font") is "compiled" by a human, and not by a
machine. Another question I still have is about a photo which is shot
in RAW and converted to JPEG. I definitely think the RAW would be the
preferred form for modifications. But the RAW is probably not in an
open format.
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