Copyright

[William Tanksley]

On Wed, 15 Apr 1998, David Manifold wrote:

>TUNES should not be distributed under the GPL because it would restrict
>some people from using it.  If TUNES were public domain, more people
>would use it even though some of them would not distribute source.
>The GPL inhibits competition between free and non-free software by
>requiring software to be free.  Because GNU forces software to be
>free, it will never be possible for the SAME PROGRAM to compete
>equally with itself under different distribution methods.  Therefore,
>it will never be completely understood what the advantages and 
>disadvantages between free and non-free software are.  I am confident
>in the free software philosophy enough to allow it to compete fairly
>with proprietary software ON THE SAME PLATFORM.

Some alternatives to the GPL are the Perl Artistic Licence, BSD's license, 
and Python's license (in order of restrictions).

BTW, "free" doesn't always mean "free", and I'm wondering which way YOU
mean it here.  I now prefer "open source software" to "free software",
since it's unambiguous.

I'm strongly against releasing anything into the public domain.

>There should not be a war between free and non-free software.  It should
>be scientifically determined which is better, for which purposes.  It
>should be expected that free software is good for one thing, and
>proprietary software is good for another.  Both should be able to
>coexist.

This is a decent argument, but doesn't doesn't give us a reason to make
Tunes stay out of the fracas.

>David E. Manifold <dem@pacificrim.net> http://www.pacificrim.net/~dem

-Billy