Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Wednesday 11 January 2012 17:19:13 Francesco Poli wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Jan 2012 10:13:33 -0500 drew Roberts wrote:
> > On Wednesday 04 January 2012 17:00:41 Francesco Poli wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > > Hence, distributing this PDF file under the terms of the CC-by-sa
> > > license, without making LaTeX source available, is like saying:
> > > "you *may* modify it, but, good luck, if you *actually* want to do so!"
> >
> > And if you never had latex yourself in the first place?
>
> The definition of source is flexible enough to cope with this scenario.
>
> If a recipient is not able or not willing to use LaTeX in order to
> modify the source, he/she may take the work in some other form (in PDF
> format, for instance), possibly convert it into another form, and
> modify it in that other form.
> At *that* point, the source for that particular modified version of the
> work, is no longer LaTeX code, since, for *that modified version*, the
> preferred form for making further modifications is really the other
> format. This is the actual source for the *modified version* of the
> work, while the source for the *original work* is still LaTeX code.

No, you are missing the point here. The original author never had latex to 
begin with. Perhaps he wrote it out longhand with ink on foolscap paper and 
scanned it in. Or took a photo of it.
>
> The same thing happens if I find a GPL-licensed program written in,
> say, Pascal, and I decide that I prefer to translate it into, say,
> Python, before modifying it.

all the best,

drew