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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el |
Date: | Tue, 26 Jan 2021 15:15:07 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0 |
On 26.01.2021 07:59, Richard Stallman wrote:
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > I think they are software, because they could be modified within an > > infinite space of possibilities. > A picture can be modified within an infinite space of possibilities. A > book can be modified. A mathematical equation can be modified. That is true, but you've taken the question I raised for myself out of its context. The real question is, "In the context, is there any doubt that this is a piece of software? If not, what else could it be? I think it is clear that a specification of a data structure, meant to guide a program's operation on that data, is software. It is comparable to a bunch of struct and enum declarations which is how we use C header files to show the structure of other data.
I'm going to say that it's not a program, in the same way as images are not part of a program code. Unlike enums that have a role in writing the code and its compilation, and thus describe aspects of a program, schemas are structured documents which contain information pertaining to other documents.
There are different things a program can do with a schema: it can determine whether a certain document is valid, or it can output some sort of structure describing the elements that are missing in the document, or it could even try to generate a sample document based on that schema (though it would require a fair amount of supporting code). This list is almost certainly incomplete.
So a schema is not a program, nor a part of a particular program.That said, if we always require that accompanying data (such as images) to be distributed under free licenses, the "software or not" question is probably moot.
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