[Gllug] Hypothetical GPL question

[jim]

On Mon, 8 Oct 2001, Paul Brazier wrote:
> This principle being established, could someone then just write a
> program in C, compile it and then claim they wrote it in machine code
> and release it under the GPL without the source code? Perhaps cleaning
> up the code so it wouldn't have any compiler "fingerprints" left.
> I'm not sure why someone would want to do this :-) but it raises the
> question of what *is* source code - does it have to easily
> human-readable?

It's an interesting question, and pretty much exactly what Dave Touretzky
has been going on about in the CSS case ... just type `touretzky' into
Google and you'll find all sorts of stuff. The line between human-readable
and non-human-readable depends almost entirely on the human; seeing as you
mention the 6502, there are people out there to whom a hex dump of a 6502
program is readable, at least to an extent (I am one of them). I would say
that most programmers in compiled languages glance at the disassembled
object code in a debugger or disassembler from time to time to see what
the compiler is doing to their code.

As an aside, there are also people out there who can read Rot-13 directly,
does the DMCA make it illegal for them to look at certain bits of
ciphertext? I'm fairly sure it makes it illegal to "traffic in" a piece of
paper with
  ABCDEFGHIJKLM
  NOPQRSTUVWXYZ
written on it. Or, seeing as machine translation is beginning to become, 
if not good at least comprehensible, could I claim that translating a
document into French, for example, was a "technological protection
measure" if I used a computer to do it? Not strictly relevant, but it
touches on the "what is readable" issue.

> To a non-programmer, access to C source code would be just as helpful as
> access to the "machine source code" i.e. the binary.

And to, say, a chip designer or an assembler writer the same would be
true, but in the opposite sense.

> Perhaps there are already GPL binaries-only out there?

It's an interesting way to abuse the GPL, if it is possible. Don't tell
rms ;)

jim
-- 
http://madeira.physiol.ucl.ac.uk/people/jim/
"... I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the
 loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
                                - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet"


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