[theme-reviewers] Minified CSS

[Chip Bennett]

"Un-obscur[ing] JS" and "decompil[ing] a binary file" have nothing to do
with applying or removing whitespace from CSS markup.

Removing whitespace from a CSS file has absolutely nothing to do with
obfuscating PHP. I find the mere suggestion to be a disingenuous straw man.
Code obfuscation *actually changes the content* of the code. Removing
whitespace does no such thing.

Removing whitespace does not require decompiling, unencoding,
reverse-engineering, or any other content-altering method in order to undo.

I would assert that your interpretation of "preferred form of the work for
making modifications" strains both the wording and the intent of the
license. Otherwise, If I don't like the way that you indent, camelcase, or
inline-document, etc. your code, by your interpretation of "preferred form
of the work for making modifications", I could, under the auspices of the
license, compel you to provide me code that meets my "preferences".

Chip

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 10:24 AM, Austin Matzko <austin at pressedcode.com>wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:19 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> > Folks, seriously? This is not a GPL issue.
> >
> > Even minified CSS is still CSS, and it's not rendered uneditable by
> > minification. Use any CSS Beautifier and voila, it'll add the
> > whitespace right back for you.
>
> And I can un-obscure JS <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/15262>
> and even decompile a binary file.
>
> Just because obscured or compiled files can be reverse-engineered
> doesn't mean that they meet the requirements of the GPL.  Chip's
> one-rule CSS example demonstrates that at the fringes GPL-compliance
> can be vague, but that doesn't imply there are no boundaries.
>
> On Fri Feb 18 15:11:20 UTC 2011, Chip Bennett <chip at chipbennett.net>
> wrote:
> > Whether or not that text file is easy to read is completely irrelevant to
> compliance to the license under which that text file is distributed.
>
> This strains the natural interpretation of "preferred form of the work
> for making modifications to it."  It also makes the unfortunate
> implication that PHP obfuscators generate GPL-compatible source code.
>
> > How the FSF "interprets" that, or how it coincides with their
> "philosophy", is essentially irrelevant.
>
> True: a license's real test is in court; everything outside of that is
> speculation.  Lacking a relevant court case so far, I'm choosing to
> side with prima facie and the FSF and admit that our disagreement on
> this point seems intractable.
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