| You are getting close to the complexity of FLOSS, but there is slightly more to it, some further thoughts below. > freedoms afforded by FLOSS licenses necessitate the availability of the source code This isn't really true, security researchers, reverse engineers and piracy experts often do the equivalent of the FSF four freedoms without having the source code. Of course not having the source code makes it harder for people without those skills and without the often costly proprietary tools that enable this work. It is possible as a technically skilled person to write a binary in machine code, without any assembly or "source code" or other primary format. When an FLOSS license is applied to that binary, it should be considered Free Software. An example of this is the hex0 binary of the stage0 project, which is the first piece of code run by the Bootstrappable Builds project, which aims to build an entire Linux distro starting with only the ~512bytes of machine code in hex0 plus all the necessary source code. https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/stage0/
https://github.com/oriansj/stage0
https://ekaitz.elenq.tech/hex0.html
https://bootstrappable.org/
https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... > Which makes me wonder if programs written to be deliberately obfuscated are technically not allowed to be considered free-libre or open source software? Debian definitely rejects such software, I assume the FSF/OSI would too, although they mostly concern themselves with licenses rather than actual software projects. In the past at least 3 times in different FSF/GNU projects, the FSF/GNU project has caused downstream GPL violations due to releases that were missing source code. Even minified JS without the original JS is not considered DFSG-free by Debian, even though it is extremely common these days. Debian applies this rule to all digital files, no matter whether they are programs or fonts or images or videos or other things. Some articles related to this topic: http://www.inventati.org/frx/essays/softfrdm/whatissource.ht...
https://b.mtjm.eu/source-code-data-fonts-free-distros.html
https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Games/Upstream/#source
http://compliance.guide/pristine > programs written to compete in IOCCC The main thing about source code is that downstream users be afforded equality of access to a work as the original author of a work. So if you can write an obfuscated program and realistically modify it yourself without hiding the real source code from users, then that is considered fine from the source code point of view. Of course it is a terrible way to write a program and should get modified to de-obfuscate everything, so more people can understand the code. |