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.