If the author of a program that outputs its own source code (quine) makes it open source, can others just distribute it as binaries? Does it matter which popular open source license he used, say GPL vs MIT?
Can a quine be distributed as binary only and be open source?
software;source code;binaries
This is categorically fine under the MIT license (as long as you follow basic attribution and license-preservation requirements), since the MIT license allows you to distribute the work (and modified forms) in binary-only format if you wish. If the binary happens also to produce source code, that's fine too, but it doesn't have to do so.For the GPL, this is probably not allowed. The binary does produce the source code when you run it, so at first glance it appears to satisfy the GPL's requirement to accompany the binary with corresponding source code. However, the ability to see the source code is contingent upon the ability to run the binary, which is a requirement that the GPL does not allow you to impose. This is a nontrivial imposition, too, since one prominent benefit of having source code is the ability to port or recompile a program to run on a new platform. In the case of quine-provided source code, users would not be able to do this unless they first had access to the binary's original platform.Admittedly, the ability to read the source code in any digital media format requires the execution of some executable -- you must run an operating system of some kind to read a USB drive or download source code from a network server -- but specifically requiring execution of the exact binary file whose source code you want to read seems substantially different and less easy to satisfy.