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Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL

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Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> writes:

> At this moment, not yet.  Obviously, old projects didn't even _have_ a
> VCS, and I'm not proposing imposing a VCS workflow on the upstream.  I'd
> like to consider, at some point in the future, hidden private VCSes
> where the upstream occassionally releases a tarball of to be non-free,
> just like the same PNG image can be free if there's no XCF file but is
> not if the upstream holds a private XCF version they routinely modify --
> a "preferred form for modification" is not required to be good, merely
> no worse than what upstream themselves use.

I don't understand why you chose the VCS specifically and alone to elevate
to the level of required source.  If I had to pick what additional
information I'd want over and above the current source code, I'd be way
more interested in the bug tracking system than the VCS.  I use that an
order of magnitude more often than I use Git history when developing
software.

There are a few other really obvious reductio ad absurdum arguments here,
too.  For example, most of the critical documentation for the Linux kernel
that's practically required in order to understand it well enough to
meaningfully maintain it is in LWN or the linux-kernel mailing list
archives.  Guess we need to start including those in the source package
now too....

The line between source and supporting useful stuff that's not source is
inherently arbitrary.  For better or worse, we have thirty years of
history behind drawing the line in one specific place.  That doesn't mean
there are no good reasons to change that line; it does mean that any other
place we draw the line is still going to be arbitrary.  Redrawing the line
is a *huge* amount of disruption and energy drain because we have to
relitigate endless mostly-settled discussions from the past thirty years
around what source code means.  The payoff needs to be correspondingly
large to be worth the effort, and I'm just not seeing it.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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anti-tarball clause and GPL Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2019-07-24 00:50 +0200
  Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Jonathan Carter <jcc@debian.org> - 2019-07-24 01:30 +0200
  Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> - 2019-07-24 02:20 +0200
    Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2019-07-24 02:40 +0200
      Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Scott Kitterman <debian@kitterman.com> - 2019-07-24 07:20 +0200
        Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2019-07-25 18:50 +0200
          Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2019-07-25 19:00 +0200
            Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> - 2019-07-25 19:20 +0200
            Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> - 2019-07-25 21:10 +0200
      Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org> - 2019-07-24 12:00 +0200
      Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> - 2019-07-28 15:40 +0200
        Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2019-07-28 18:30 +0200
  Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Yao Wei <mwei@debian.org> - 2019-07-24 03:00 +0200
    Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> - 2019-07-25 20:10 +0200
      Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL "Yao Wei (魏銘廷)" <mwei@debian.org> - 2019-07-26 03:50 +0200
  Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Giacomo Catenazzi <cate@cateee.net> - 2019-07-24 10:20 +0200
  Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> - 2019-07-24 22:30 +0200
    Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Yao Wei <mwei@debian.org> - 2019-07-25 00:40 +0200
      Re: anti-tarball clause and GPL Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> - 2019-07-25 21:10 +0200

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