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From: matt@group-w.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Egregious restrictions on source code in comp.sources.unix
Message-ID: <973@gargoyle.uchicago.edu>
Date: 2 May 90 14:59:01 GMT
Sender: news@gargoyle.uchicago.edu
Reply-To: matt@group-w.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford)
Organization: Chicago Superconductivity Center - "Resistance is useless!"
Lines: 43

By now many of you will have noticed some absurd restrictions placed in
the copyright notices on sources submitted by Dan Bernstein to
comp.sources.unix.  The conditions include

	o  No rights to the recipient except those explicitly granted.

	o  The right to make and distribute exact copies, but not any
	   derivative forms, as long as no fee is charged.

	o  Those rights, what few there are, are revocable upon
	   "written, oral, or other" notice, and are "automatically"
	   revoked on a certain date in the future.

Putting aside any discussion of whether compiling a program is creating
a derivative work (and whether telepathic messages constitute "other"
notification!), these restrictions are utterly absurd to the point that
I think the resources of USENET are wasted in transmitting this stuff.
Anyone using this code is running a big risk, since the author obviously
has legalisms on his mind.

I urge all comp.sources.unix readers who share my opinions to write to
Dan Bernstein <brnstnd@acf10.nyu.edu> and express their disapproval.

I urge Rich $alz to accept no more submissions with terms similar to
those Dan Bernstein uses.

I urge all comp.sources.unix archivists to delete Dan's recent
submissions from their archives.  Indeed, your corporate lawyers would
probably *demand* that you delete them if they saw them.  (UUNET is
probably already in violation of Dan's nutty terms!)



I had an email exchange with this same Dan Berstein about a month ago in
which he claimed that he believed in promoting free software.  He said
that the FSF's General Public License was the wrong way to pursue that
goal, and that I should wait until I saw *his* marvelous license!  Now
I've seen it, and it makes me want to scrub my disk drive with soap and
water where his bytes have temporarily fouled it.  (Anyone who wants to
criticize me for hyperbole should read Bernstein's license first!)

________________________________________________________
Matt Crawford	     		matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu