[freeroleplay] Re: Descriptive vs. Proscriptive
- From: Mark Havenner <laveaux@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <freeroleplay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 02 Aug 2005 06:49:48 -0600
Good points - I'd also say that one person's idea of 'best' varies from
another. I come from the design world, so that is the experience I draw
upon, but even in that industry there are InDesign people and Quark people
and ne'er the two shall meet.
In my field a high quality PDF is becoming a preferable source now that
printing presses are able to use them, but that would not be a good source
for, say, a game because it is too large - I would have to make a low res
version that is downloadable and again ... Is that actually preferable, even
though it isn't the best quality? To compound that, I would likely have to
provide source images. I don't know about you, but I don't want to download
10G of high-res TIFs every time a buy a game. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the
license, but that's how it reads to me.
On 8/2/05 6:43 AM, "Samuel Penn" <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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?
--
Mark Havenner
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup,
They slither while they pass, they slip away across the universe
- The Beatles
Other related posts:
