Preferred form

Posted Aug 4, 2011 17:24 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
Parent article: Emacs and the GPL

This one is easy, especially for old versions to cover them. Since the original author made his changes to the files which were distributed the argument that those files were the 'preferred form of the work for making changes' is fairly strong even if those files were not originally hand written.

It is fairly common for programs to be written by programs based on some source of data. For example, if you embed a list of information (phone area codes or something that changes only slowly) into a C header does a GPL program then have to include the list used to feed into it and the trivial script that transformed it into a header? Any future changes would as likely be made by just patching the header as regenerating it. Is it that bison was used instead of a one off perl script that makes it different?

Or try this: XBM images are C headers, so do they require the 'original' image? Must the software used to translate between that original format and XBM be included? Where does the line between sanity and reductio ad absurdum lie when lawyers are involved?

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Preferred form

Posted Aug 5, 2011 0:10 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

My impression from the story is that the BISON source is in fact the preferred form for making most changes to this code, and the original author's method for making changes was to change the BISON source, compile it to elisp, then hand-edit the elisp.

If not, I doubt he would have bothered to respond to the complaint by distributing the BISON source and a program that automates the hand-edits.

I think people understand the idea that sometimes source code was originally generated from some other input file, but is nonetheless the source code -- the preferred form for making changes -- after that.

We haven't seen much controversy over preferred form, but I assume if there ever is any, the methods that the alleged copyright infringer uses himself to modify the code would figure strongly into deciding the issue.

Preferred form

Posted Aug 13, 2011 13:19 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]

"Project templates" such as many IDEs or the tools that come with e.g. Django & Quickly provide are another well-known example of where the generated code and not the input file is the preferred form.