Re: [GNU-linux-libre] Hyperbola: Other "Information for practical use" under a free license

[bill-auger]

i think adonay is mostly echo-ing my point that it is a shame that the
complete corresponding source requirement is not encouraged or even
mentioned as a option for artworks by those who have taken it upon
themselves to define "free culture" for everyone else - without that,
there is nothing to distinguish "free culture" from those who would
rather say "open culture"

in the context of the FSDG, the only reason for sorting what is
functional and what is not is to relax the licensing requirements on the
"non-functional" parts - practically speaking though, even if the FSDG
required all "non-functional" parts to be under a "free culture"
license, that adds very little value to what are essentially fixed blobs

but beyond that, it is a mistake to equate images, video, or audio with
source code; which is what the "free culture" definition essentially
does - it quite assumes that mere distribution provides freedom with the
mostly useless caveat that crude modifications are possible - the free
software definition includes permissive licenses for source code only
because it *is* the source code; which is implicitly assumed to be
modifiable as it is itself the preferred form for modification - but
simply applying that model to artwork blobs does not do the same job;
because these are rarely accompanied by their sources

i would hope that the "free culture" advocates themselves would adopt
the full requirements of the GPL as a core principle - then, even if the
FSDG did not require it, any distro that adopts "free culture" could
then be truly 100% free as in freedom in all of its bits - i think the
point adonay was making is that: any distro today that wants to take
computing freedom across that final frontier, does so quite on their own
and in spite of the fact that the formal stewards of computing freedom
do not even recommend it

to be clear though, all that is mostly speaking to the "all
non-functional data must be freely distributable" criteria; which is
distinct from the one this thread pertains to

to the point of this "other practical data" criteria:

On 05/15/2018 10:19 PM, Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:
> I think this requirement is made such that
> people can sell exact copies of the entire system distribution.

"selling" is not any concern - this criteria is a catch-all for
everything that is not otherwise plainly under the other specific
criteria of  "software", "firmware", "documentation", or
"non-functional" - nothing more than freedom #2, this is to ensure that
the distro can be distributed as a whole - whether that is gratis or not
is not important

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature