On 20-Jan-2008, Alex Hudson wrote:
On Sun, 2008-01-20 at 11:41 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
If you truly want the policy to be robust, it's important to avoid the fallacy that programs can be discretely separated from other interpretations of digital information.
That's not a fallacy, it's a difference of opinion.
It's a fact that bit-collections can be simultaneously "program", "documentation", "art", and "documentation". Therefore it's a fallacy to name those categories and expect that bit-collections will fall into exactly one of them.
It's perfectly possible to talk about digital works in terms of what their function is, what freedoms you might need for those functions, and whether or not a work is free for a certain function.
You're saying the freedom of a work depends on the function an arbitrary person has in mind for it? Who gets to be that person? What if one recipient of the work has a different function in mind for it?
This logic leads to a single work being both free and non-free. That's not a way to draft a robust policy on freedom of works.
Without the function it's pretty meaningless. You can't point at a random binary, without knowing its function but knowing its license, and call it either "free" or "not free".
Certainly I can. It's not at all necessary to know the purpose to which a work will be put to come up with a good definition of "free software". The FSF already did so, though they insist on only applying their definition to programs.
The free software definition requires that works be free to use for *any* purpose. Works licensed such that they meet the free software definition are free by that definition; others are not. The function of the work doesn't need to come into consideration at all. I argue that if it *does* come into consideration, then you are making freedom of the work contingent on what the recipient intends to do with the work, and that by definition isn't free.