Metaprogramming and Free Availability of Sources

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear Richard,
   last sunday, you told me to ask you my question later. So here it is.

In a conference sooner this year, I wrote a paper,
freely available on the web in either french or english:
	Métaprogrammation et libre disponibilité des sources
		http://www.tunes.org/~fare/articles/ll99/index.fr.html
	Metaprogramming and Free Availability of Sources
		http://www.tunes.org/~fare/articles/ll99/index.en.html

In this paper, I contend that a natural way to develop programs
is by systematically writing metaprograms (which indeed has been the
path unconsciously followed by GNU and other free software projects,
with emacs, gcc, binutils, make, perl, etc). I explain that intellectual
property has been a great brake to this style of programming,
among other terrible consequences on programming technology.

However, even with free software, incompatible licenses
(such as GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, Artistic, MPL and derivatives, OPL, etc)
essentially prevent metaprogramming among license-incompatible programs,
unless all programs have but one drop their licensing restriction
on the compound (such as GCC not considering its output as GPLed),
which discourages the development and use of any information-adding
metaprogram (such as an expert system, a dynamic language with integrated
run-time, any non-autistic AI program, or whatever).

So my question is, what do you recommend to overcome
this incompatible license restriction?
My solution is that any and all claim to "intellectual property"
should be considered as null and void,
being contrary to the most basic human rights.
In the meantime, I use the GPL for everything I write, software or not,
so as to be sure that it is all license-compatible for arbitrary
automatic and manual processing.
What do you think of it all?

PS: on a completely different, I made an analysis of reasons
behind the failure of HURD as an OS architecture,
which I published some time ago in the TUNES Glossary:
	http://www.tunes.org/papers/Glossary/index.html#microkernel

PPS: I put in Cc: the mailing-list for the TUNES Project to which I pertain.

[ "Faré" | VN: Уng-Vû Bân | Join the TUNES project!   http://www.tunes.org/  ]
[ FR: François-René Rideau | TUNES is a Useful, Nevertheless Expedient System ]
[ Reflection&Cybernethics  | Project for  a Free Reflective  Computing System ]
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
		-- Gandhi