On 20-Jan-2008, Alex Hudson wrote:
On Sun, 2008-01-20 at 21:54 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
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.
I didn't say it would fall into exactly one of them; I disagree with the notion that they can't be separated.
Making a policy that requires different freedoms depending on the different functions of a work is requiring that they *always* be separated. If they *can* be combined in the same work, the policy is no longer robust.
Better to define a policy that requires the same freedoms *regardless* the function of the work.
As an obvious example, you don't know what legal rights the author has to that binary, and if the license doesn't offer permissions to those rights then it's clearly non-free.
How would knowing the function ever guarantee that I know the rights the *author* has in the work? It might clarify some issues, but if you're suggesting I could know with certainty the *absence* of obligation on the copyright holder, that's not possible.
It's also irrelevant. As a recipient of the work, I must take the work and its license terms as given, and judge the freedom of the work based on what rights the *recipient* has in the work.
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.
And I would argue it's an immediately practical concern since much of what defines a given work as being free is the license applied to it.
Yes, exactly. We seem to be in agreement on this point. The license terms on a work are a major factor in determining the freedom of the work for recipients of that work.
The law talks in terms of function, not form, and thus the freeness is based on function, not form.
That's a non-sequitur. The law can impose restrictions; it's up to us to define what freedoms we require. The free software definition, and the free culture definition, both do a fine job of defining free software with a requirement that function *not* be a factor.