On 19-Jan-2008, David Gerard wrote:
The Wikimedia Foundation is drafting its policy on freedom of file formats. Please pick loopholes, we'd like this to be robust.
(in this context, "free software" = meets free software definition, "free content" = meets definition 1.0 on freedomdefined.org, which is the same thing for content rather than software)
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.
Whether digital information is "program", "documentation", "image", "content", or some other form of information depends largely on how it is *interpreted* at a particular time, which is a function of the process used to interpret it, *not* something inherent in the information.
The very same collection of bits can be "program", "documentation", "image", "content", "art", and "data", all at the same time; consider e.g. a PostScript program. The other purpose-driven categories of digital information have similar overlaps. It's folly to draft a policy for *the information itself* that is dependent on its intended interpretation, because that it not a function over which the policy-maker has jurisdiction.
The term "software" is better understood as opposed to "hardware": that is, software is *any* information in digital form, and the medium in which it exists at a given moment is the hardware. These distinctions persist over time, and so a policy can meaningfully be formed around them.
If the freedom of a work is to be usefully defined over time, it cannot be on the basis of its interpretation. Attempting to have *different* freedoms obtain to a work depending on whether it is "documentation", "data", "content", "art", "program" etc. will fail in the numerous cases when a work is in several different categories.