Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aiai!jeff From: jeff@aiai.uucp (Jeff Dalton) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: BISON, GCC, and the GNU public license. (Re: increasing yacc states) Message-ID: <643@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 28 Jul 89 12:00:27 GMT References: <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <26609@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5271@ficc.uu.net> Sender: news@aiai.ed.ac.uk Reply-To: jeff@aiai.uucp (Jeff Dalton) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 19 In article <5271@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <26609@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes: >> The GNU General Public License isn't about profit or sales, it's about >> the right to give away neat tools to our friends. > >No, it's about the right of intellectual property. It uses the laws >that are based on that right to deny it to other people. I find this argument very strange. What the so-called copyleft does is to put limits on how the software can be used. If you want to go beyone those limits, then you can't use FSF software. But a number of other people can work within those limits. If the FSF software were commercial software, as it is usually distributed, it would have much stronger restrictions, and many of the people who can now benefit from FSF software wouldn't be able to benefit at all. The FSF has simply chosen what sorts of use they want to support, which is perfectly within their rights and does not take away the rights of anyone else. All it does is not give away all of the rights that it's possible to give away.