On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 08:10 +0200, Anthere wrote:
I have been wondering if the problem was not in the
definition of the
term "source". Can anyone explain to me what is "source" ????
That's one definition that's pretty easy: the "source data" of any
piece of information is _the most preferred form_ of that data for
making changes. So for program code that would imply fully-commented
source code as the original developer used; for wiki articles it
would be the wikitext. For images it might be some graphic editor's
native format that contains info on layers and objects and such.
For other forms of text, it might be native files from Word, pre-
transformed XML with XSLT stylesheets, etc.
On a larger issue, I don't think Wikipedia should fall into the trap
of accepting definitions of terms from activists. NPOV and the needs
of an encyclopedia demand that we not allow hijacking of the language
by folks like FSF, OSI, and others, good though their intentions may
be. For example, any definition of "free software" that includes the
GPL but not Sun's Java or MySQL is a horrible abuse of plain English.
Of course, we should report that large groups of people use these
terms in specialized ways, so long as we refrain from endorsing such
use.
Your particular case is another good example of language abuse: for
software, the "generally accepted" (meaning as forced upon geeks like
us by FSF and OSI) notions of "free software" and "open source
software"
mean "comes with source code and licensed to require disclosure of
source in derivative products" and just "comes with source code"
respectively; whereas in the textual content world, the terms "free
content" and "open content" are generally used interchangeably to mean
"licensed to allow redistribution"; but some activists (those with whom
you are arguing) would have "free" mean "comes with source and licensed
to require distribution of source in derivatives".
--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lee/>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>