Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!purdue!decwrl!granite.pa.dec.com!mellon From: mellon@zayante.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Questions Message-ID: Date: 5 Aug 89 00:16:07 GMT References: <115@isgtec.UUCP> Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com Distribution: gnu Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation Lines: 19 The hospital doesn't have to find the volunteers. They will wind up paying for the software in the cost of the hardware. The case where you have to buy hardware in order to use a piece of software is a classic situation in which a copyright doesn't make a big difference anyway. Also, the GNU project has been going on for several years now, and lots of people have donated time. I suspect that more than 100 man months of effort are donated every year. If I thought it would materially advance medical technology, I'd probably be more than happy to do volunteer work on a cat scanner program. Imagine if the next generation of cat scanner didn't require a complete rewrite of the previous generations code. Wouldn't technology progress a little faster? It probably wouldn't take 100 man months to make the software work. _MelloN_