[freeroleplay] Re: Descriptive vs. Proscriptive
- From: "Samuel Penn" <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 13:43:13 +0100 (BST)
On Tue, August 2, 2005 13:14, Mark Havenner said:
> And what if I imbed my images at a high resolution in Quark or InDesign?
To give a real world example, I refer people back to my discussion
about Free space combat wargames, and the statement that I had
some details written up, but making it available was difficult.
Graphics were done in Artworks, a proprietry vector graphics
application for a operating system platform that is now pretty
much dead. This was the 'preferred source', and changing it to
any other format will probably loose information, but this
'source' is totally useless to most people.
Likewise the rules were written in Impression Publisher, again
a proprietry DTP program that hasn't been available for about
five years, and which only ran on the same almost-dead platform.
The read-only PDFs of these documents are probably more useful
to the community than the source files.
This is the reason Myths will never be licensed under the GPL -
it's in an effectively dead format, and though I'd be quite
happy to provide the 'source' to anyone who asked, the PDF
versions are more useful.
A counter argument of course is that source code to a computer
program is useless to most people (especially on MS Windows) -
they'd prefer just a binary they can run, so the 'source'
doesn't have to be useful to everyone, so the 'useful to everyone'
requirement is irrelevent.
The ideal would be to provide the 'best quality' version along
with a 'widely readable' version, so people can access whichever
one they want.
Of course, then we run into the issue that if someone can't read
the 'best quality' version (since they don't have Quark or
whatever) so modify and distribute the 'widely readable' version,
are they now breaking the license since they cannot provide the
'best quality source' for their modification?
--
Be seeing you,
Sam.
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