From: davidsen@ariel.crd.GE.COM (william E Davidsen) Subject: Re: GNU Public license and the future of Linux... Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1993 17:31:36 GMT
In article <BURLEY.93Jun10113744@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, burley@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Craig Burley) writes:
| From services rendered, like writing software. Or do you think their
| only choice is to take other people's software, package it as there
| own, sell it, and restrict the recipients so they can't make copies and
| access source code as freely as Joe and Jill did?
Sorry, I feel that Joe and Jill have the right to sell or give away
their work, with or without source, and that they have the right to
control their own software. All this stuff about restricting
distribution of other software is a irrelevant.
|
| Government will not pay to develop "free" software.
|
| False. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what percentage of PD
| software currently available was funded by the US government?
No, but if you want to claim it was a high percentage please post some
source for your numbers.
|
| Colleges & Universities will only pay to develop
| free software to the extent that it is part of a research project.
|
| False. Or do you consider X to be a "research project" only?
First, the hardware was donated by commercial hardware vendors, second
parts of X were originally written by employees of those vendors, third
it can be argued that MIT was "paid" in hardware for some of it's
effort. And now a lot of the development is being done elsewhere, with
central coordination. X was not an altruistic gesture by MIT alone, it
was a project of mutual benefit to the vendors who get the end result
cheaper than writing it themselves, and got a standard, and by MIT who
got the benefit of prestige, publicity, and papers published.
| James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson burley@gnu.ai.mit.edu
| Member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) lpf@uunet.uu.net
Let's say that people who's affiliation is academic or political
(depending on the address used) may have a different outlook than those
who are in the .com domain.
--
bill davidsen, GE Corp. R&D Center; 518-387-6489
TMR Associates, +1 518-370-5654
Custom programming, system configuration, data acquisition,
industrial monitoring and "smart house" environment control.