gEDA-user: [gnu.org #214077] Transparency of copies in GNU FDL for electric schemata

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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-- Cut here --
Delivery-Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:56:52 -0500
From: "Dave Turner via RT" <licensing@xxxxxxx>

> [clock@xxxxxxxxxxxxx - Mon Nov 08 14:06:25 2004]:
> 
> Hello GNU,
> 
> I am not sure if something is considered a transparent copy or not in
> context with GNU FDL.
> 
> Let's say I have an electric schematic diagram created in gschem (a
> GPL'd schematic editor) and is placed under GNU FDL. Someone redraws 
> it into say Orcad (a proprietary schematic drawing program) and 
> provides PNG snapshots of the schematics.
> 
> Is this considered a transparent copy or not? FDL says that
> "Examples of transparent image formats include PNG"
> but also "A copy made in an otherwise Transparent file format whose
> markup, or absence of markup, has been arranged to thwart or 
> discourage subsequent modification by readers is not Transparent."
> 
> Displaying a schematic this way of course poses only very limited way
> to edit it (editing a schematic in GIMP is very annoying and you lose 
> all the functionality for example in a possibility of generating a 
> partlist that was present in the original gschem schematic 
> previously).

In this case, PNG is not a transparent format.  It would also not be a
transparent format in the case of a text document.

-- 
-Dave "Novalis" Turner
GPL Compliance Engineer
Free Software Foundation