FDL requirements for original author

Alex Hudson home at alexhudson.com
Tue Feb 5 11:18:10 UTC 2008


On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 11:17 +0000, David Gerard wrote:
> In practical use on Wikimedia sites, it's generally been taken to mean
> that whatever the reuser receives under GFDL is the transparent copy -
> e.g., even if the author made a picture in Inkscape, if he releases a
> rendered PNG under GFDL then that's the thing that's released under
> GFDL.

The question of transparency is more objective than that; the file
format has to be readily amenable to editing. E.g., a PNG with a lot of
text is not transparent, even if that's what the author released.

If the original release from the author is not transparent, I think
subsequent distributors could fall foul of the opaqueness rules, and
would be unable to distribute according to the license. I wouldn't see
that as being any different to releasing a binary under the GPL; just
because that's what was released doesn't make it "the source" (the
requirements in the two cases are very different, though, so maybe not
directly comparable).

Cheers,

Alex.




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