Talk:Source Code

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This page is really a draft! Perhaps we will need it, perhaps not ;-) --Antoine 05:33, 15 May 2006 (CEST)

Transitivity

Quote: Of course, the source code must satisfy to the freedoms of free content as well. Therefore, by recursivity, our definition is not weaker than the one in the GNU GPL.

I would note that the definition here for soure code ("symbolic modifiable form") is incompatible with the simper, FSF definition ("the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"[1]). Source code forms allowed by the GPL might not be similarly allowed by the above definition if, for example, they do not include "symbolic" information. --Ricardo Gladwell 11:16, 15 May 2006 (CEST)

Definition of "source code"

But there are also situations where the idea of source code appears irrelevant or even meaningless. Consider a digital recording of a modern rock concert. How do we define "source code" ? No symbolic or textual transcription of the concert will be able to describe exactly (so as to reproduce accurately) the manner in which the guitarist picked the strings of his instruments, the slight variations in pitch or tempo of the singer, etc.

Lately we've had much of this kind of talk in the Neverball community, deciding which license to use for data, what qualifies as source material, how to distribute it, etc. I think it's important to realize that "source code" contains the word "source", hence in the example above the source material is likely to be the original recording (say, an WAV file) and not a mere transcription of it. If the original happens to be in a proprietary format useless to most people, use the "the best we can get is good enough" approach and your best judgement. (We decided to use lossless FLAC files.) -- parasti @ 18:06, 15 December 2006 (CET)