Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!batcomputer!riley From: riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: PD or Shareware Copyrights Message-ID: <8262@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> Date: 26 Jun 89 16:02:43 GMT References: <18195@louie.udel.EDU> <18280@louie.udel.EDU> <18366@louie.udel.EDU> Reply-To: riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley) Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY Lines: 31 In article shadow@pawl.rpi.edu (Deven T. Corzine) writes: >Bzzt. Wrong answer, thank you for playing anyway. Emacs is NOT PD. >Emacs is a product of the GNU effort by the Free Software Foundation, >and is "copylefted." Several other people have already pointed out that there are *many* editors called emacs, and GNU emacs is not the original. >Specifically, it is covered by a very specific >copyright and liscence [...] >This INCLUDES derived works. Now, whether >Amiga versions of MicroEmacs or MG are technically "derived works" of >GNU Emacs, I can't say for sure, but I would expect that they are. >Even if NO code overlaps, I suspect that they are at least reverse- >engineered from GNU Emacs is sufficient to consider them derived >works. Stallman would have a fit. Such an extended copyright on "derived works" essentially amounts to the same thing as Apple's "Look & Feel" copyright, which rms and the FSF are adamantly opposed to. In fact, most of the GNU software is "derived", in this sense--they copy the interfaces of popular Unix (TM) programs which AT&T or Berkeley hold copyrights to. -Dan Riley (riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu, cornell!batcomputer!riley) -Wilson Lab, Cornell U. I thought about directing followups to gnu.gcc, but that would be cruel :-).