Still more License issues

[Ingemar Hulthage]

"hulthage wrote: "
>From hulthage Mon May  5 20:26:05 1997
Subject: Re: Still more License issues
To: rideau@clipper.ens.fr
Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 20:26:05 -0700 (PDT)
In-Reply-To: <199705042317.BAA02112@Kadath.ens.fr> from "Fare Rideau" at May 5, 97 01:17:19 am
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"Fare Rideau wrote: "
> 
> >>: Ingemar Hulthage
> 
> >> A related issue is what position to take on Copyright issues.
> >> [CMUCL and FreeBSD tradition] i.e essentially no restrictions at all.
> >> I propose that LispOS code should be given away freely at no cost
> >> (as is, with no warranties) and with no other restriction
> >> than that the use of LispOS
> >> code should be acknowledged in any redistribution.
> >
> What if Microsoft, or whoever, then takes your code,
> make it proprietary, and cast customers into another world
> of submission to their lousy substandards?
> That's the only thing you can hope to gain that way!

Nonsense, microsoft can afford to rewrite everything from scratch and
probably would want to.  Only small people are stoped by the FSF
licence.

> >> This is somewhat different from the 'Free Software Foundation's (FSF)
> >> approach, adopted by Linux, which through complicated restrictions,
> >> try to ensure that derivative works are also released under the same
> >> license.  I personaly think that's unnecessary and a detriment to
> >> commercial use.
> 
> How do you imagine GPL is any detrimental to fair commercial activity?
> Aren't Cygnus, RedHat, and more, successfully selling services around
> free software? Isn't Caldera marketing commercial software for Linux?
> Come on! Stop the anti-FSF paranoia!

What paranoia ?  The only thing I have said is that there is a choice
to be made and what my recommendation is.  Are you accusing the
creators of CMUCL and FreeBSD to be paranoid ?  You are the one who
uses expressions like "cast .. into .. submission".

> Have you read the GPL? And the comments made about it in GNU documentation?

Yes, carefully.

> How is it any complicated?

I would think most people who have read it, would say it's complicated.

>    I'd accept that the GPL be rejected as a deliberate choice,
> but not on blattantly false grounds!

Good.  However, that you disagree with my opinions doesen't make them
'false'.

...

> Unrestricted license means that a big company could come,
> steal it, sell it for hard bucks,
> claim it's theirs, just having to display a vague message somewhere
> about *some* code being from the original author,
> and specifically modify code in lousy proprietary ways
> to lock the market into their hands,
> so that they benefit from the code you wrote,
> and forbid other people to do so too.

This is a very confused.  You are dreaming if you think that this
group is going to be able to produce something that can be sold for
'hard bucks'.  Microsoft is about the only company that can earn money
on operating systems for PCs.  How can anyboudy "lock the market" or
"forbid other people" with freely distributed code.

> Linux accepts modules. Your hooks and patches need be GPL,
> but whatever code you add to Linux through modules needn't.
 
Apropos complicated, what is the difference between a patch and a module ?

Ingemar


Ingemar Hulthage
					
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