Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!mentor.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: The GNU Public License Summary: The user needs to be able to modify software. Message-ID: <1463@l.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 1 Aug 89 13:07:32 GMT References: <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <98@euteal.ele.tue.nl> Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department Lines: 30 In article <98@euteal.ele.tue.nl>, mart@ele.tue.nl (Mart van Stiphout) writes: > In article <1811@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> gl8f@Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes: > >Imminent Death of Commercial Software Predicted!! Just think of all those > >companies writing C compilers and editors that will go out of business > >because their products are inferior to GNU C and GNU Emacs? Sniff, sniff. > > There seems to be this big misunderstanding that only gnurus can write > a decent piece of software and that commercial software is > equivalent to crap. I assume that all software, including what the gnurus write, may not be appropriate to my needs. Therefore, either the software provider should be willing and able to make the necessary modifications quickly (extremely doubtful), or the necessary information should be supplied so that the modifications can be made here quickly. The FSF takes this attitude, and insists that if you provide software including or directly derived from (not compiled with) their software that you do likewise. The copyleft is a way to do this within present law. If you can think of a better way, I suggest you communicate with them. I am in no way associated with FSF, but I support the idea of software which the user can modify easily. I think it should be simpler and more powerful, and somewhat less user-inimical. I would object to a car being programmed in such a way that it could select a path to a destination and not let me override that path. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)