Binary vs Source
February 15th, 2006 by Hen[Repeat 100 times: IANAL]
Binary and Source are interesting terms. When reading licenses I’ve always thought of Binary as the important word - something in a format that I cannot read. So I thought the following would be binary: .psd Photoshop files, .doc Word files. Even things which are technically text-ish seemed like binary: .pdf Acrobat files, .ps PostScript files. So naturally I’ve thought of Source as the opposite, things I can read.
That doesn’t fit if you look at things backwards. Source doesn’t mean readable, it means input. It means I have the ability to modify and (presumably) recreate. So .psd Photoshop files are source, not binary - the images are the binary. A .doc Word file is source (and has no binary, unless you count what you see on the screen or paper). A .pdf however is a Binary, if produced from an InDesign .indd format; but not binary if produced from something which edits .pdf’s directly. Using Fireworks on a .png becomes weird; suddenly it’s like an interpreted language because the tool uses the same format for source and binary - though the large Fireworks specific bits inside the png often are removed when producing the output, so that would then be binary.
It’s all very confusing. It seems as though it’s not just the source and binary files that count; it’s the tool. Imagine a code generator; its binary might be Java source code.