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From: davidsen@sungod.crd.ge.com (William Davidsen)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: BISON, GCC, and the GNU public license. (Re: increasing yacc states)
Message-ID: <1447@crdgw1.crd.ge.com>
Date: 2 Aug 89 16:25:17 GMT
References: <Jul.5.09.29.33.1989.23541@topaz.rutgers.edu> <26@ark1.nswc.navy.mil> <26695@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5303@ficc.uu.net> <26759@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric Corp. R&D, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 38

In article <26759@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> mwm@eris.berkeley.edu (Mike (I'll think of something yet) Meyer) writes:

| <You seem to have left out one part:
| <
| <It also covers any software that includes any FSF software. That is,
| <it makes the wholly remarkable jump to including any such software as
| <being the intellectual property of the Free Software Foundation.
| 
| What's remarkable about that jump? That's what others have been doing
| for years - except instead of requiring you to share your software,
| they insist that you get their permission to distribute it in any way
| whatsoever.

  Actually that's an experiment which ended about 15 years ago. Many
vendors claimed a right to programs which were linked with their runtime
library. Then a few started offering "no royalties on executable
programs." Market pressure did the rest, and I can't remember when I saw
junk like that.

  If you really want to read the copyleft "between the lines," I think I
can make a good case that this applies to GNUemacs, too, and that if you
edit one byte of a source file with GNUemacs you must give away the
source with the program! This is fair?

**************** workstation buyers ****************

  I am told that some workstations will be distributed with GNU
software as the development set. Be sure that you and/or your managers
are willing to give away and code you develop using these workstations,
or that there is a change in the manifesto as applied to these
workstations. People have been spoiled by the real UNIX(r) software
license which makes no claims on the final product, and may not realize
that these workstations are covered by a more (or less, depending on
your view) restrictive agreement.

	bill davidsen		(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me