On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 08:10 +0200, Anthere wrote:
I have been wondering if the problem was not in the definition of the term "source". Can anyone explain to me what is "source" ????
That's one definition that's pretty easy: the "source data" of any piece of information is _the most preferred form_ of that data for making changes. So for program code that would imply fully-commented source code as the original developer used; for wiki articles it would be the wikitext. For images it might be some graphic editor's native format that contains info on layers and objects and such. For other forms of text, it might be native files from Word, pre- transformed XML with XSLT stylesheets, etc.
On a larger issue, I don't think Wikipedia should fall into the trap of accepting definitions of terms from activists. NPOV and the needs of an encyclopedia demand that we not allow hijacking of the language by folks like FSF, OSI, and others, good though their intentions may be. For example, any definition of "free software" that includes the GPL but not Sun's Java or MySQL is a horrible abuse of plain English. Of course, we should report that large groups of people use these terms in specialized ways, so long as we refrain from endorsing such use.
Your particular case is another good example of language abuse: for software, the "generally accepted" (meaning as forced upon geeks like us by FSF and OSI) notions of "free software" and "open source software" mean "comes with source code and licensed to require disclosure of source in derivative products" and just "comes with source code" respectively; whereas in the textual content world, the terms "free content" and "open content" are generally used interchangeably to mean "licensed to allow redistribution"; but some activists (those with whom you are arguing) would have "free" mean "comes with source and licensed to require distribution of source in derivatives".