Re: gEDA-user: Re: Comment on free technology please

[DJ Delorie <dj@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What if the developer is a hypertrophed genius and doesn't mean if
> he uses this form or the original one and really uses this for his
> editation?  Then he won't breach GPL although it will be unusable
> for the others.

Correct.  I've written code like that before ;-)

(it would, however, be usable by any other equally hypertrophied
genius, of course, and the GPL is for those people)

> And he can claim he is a reverse-engineering specialist and he has
> translated the C source into machine language because he actually
> loves machine code and he uses it for editation (and actually is
> just a thief stealing GPL code and making binary proprietary
> applications). You can't prove someone isn't a genius. He may be a
> hidden genius and he isn't obliged to demonstrate you that he is a
> genius if he is one.

These kinds of issues are normally resolved in court, not on mailing
lists.  I don't think there's an easy generic answer, although
(speaking from experience) it's pretty easy to tell hand-written code
from machine-generated code, regardless of the language used.

> Shouldn't this be formulated as not for the particular author but
> for average developer public?

No, it's always for the particular author.  The GPL can't
inconvenience an author by demanding he "dumb down" his coding style
to meed the needs of those without his skills, that's
counter-productive.  The GPL only requires it be as easy (technically)
for others (presumably, with equivalent skill sets) as for the author.

Let's say, for example, I write a cad program entirely in assembler
(I'm crazy enough to do such a thing).  Your suggestion would mean I'd
have to also write copies in C, Pascal, Visual Basic, and Java,
because other people prefer those languages.

As a more concrete example, DJGPP's stub loader is hand-written
self-modifying assembler parsed by a DJGPP-specific assembler program.
There's a warning at the top that people shouldn't try editing it,
even if they think they know what they're doing.  But, it complies
with the GPL because *we* edit that file.