Dear sir/madam, We have had a discussion at debian-russian@lists.debian.org list concerning GPL and so-called "obfuscators" (like http://www.stunnix.com/prod/perl-obfus.shtml). The discussion was in Russian. There were some people, who believed that applying the obfuscator to the GPL program is not covered by GPL, especially in case obfuscator was used by the software author. Their argument was: "it is still modifiable".
But we believe, that this phrase: ========== The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. ========== prohibits obfuscator usage on GPL sources (GNU GPL, part 3, paragraph 2). We'd really like to know, is it really true. And if it is, then we think that adding such a question to this page: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html would be much of a help -- e.g. for further reference. An example: ========== Q: I want to use obfuscator on the distributed sources A: ... ========== Regards, -- /Andrei Sosnin/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> /Sergey Spiridonov/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>