Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!munnari.oz.au!metro!cluster!ultima!nick From: nick@ultima.cs.uts.oz (Nick Andrew) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Your articles sold for cash. Message-ID: <18136@ultima.cs.uts.oz> Date: 1 Aug 90 13:35:35 GMT References: <5414@castle.ed.ac.uk> <26259@usc.edu> Organization: Comp Sci, NSWIT, Australia Lines: 103 kjh@pollux.usc.edu (Kenneth J. Hendrickson) writes: >I don't mind if anybody uses my postings for personal use, and I also >don't mind if they use them in some business, as long as they are not >directly profiting from my work. (That is - if they just use the Minix >operating system to do other work, this is just fine.) I am really >upset that somebody would have the gall to re-sell my postings and >profit from them. I can't see how they are making profit from those patches if they sell for $87.95 _including_ MINIX! I imagine MINIX itself would cost about that much, so I rather doubt "The MINIX centre" is making any money by adding extra "patches from USENET". Second point: what have you got to do with the "patches" they "sell"? Are they your patches, your own personal postings? If this is so, and you value them so, why did you post them to the network in the first place? Give 26,000 people a copy of your creation without qualms, and you then worry if a few hundred more get it virtually bundled free with Minix? Third point: I suspect the "patches" referred to are Andy's 1.5 patches. They may include 'significant' program postings (like UUCP). Why don't we ask Andy what he thinks of the practice. >Well, we can (and should) let Prentice Hall know about this. Second, I >will start to put a notice on my postings that they cannot be sold or >re-sold by any party, any time, or any place. I think if you do that you will find Prentice-Hall will forbid Andy to post further updates to the net. Now you wouldn't like that, would you? And if that happened, Minix would stagnate. Why? Because I think the regular update postings are what keep MINIX improving. It goes in a cycle: * People get MINIX, they find bugs, fix them, post them to the net * Andy collects the postings, eventually creates a new version, posts diffs * People download the diffs and apply them. They find the bugs and fix them and post to the net. Andy collects these fixes, updates his master and posts further updates. More people find bugs, the cycle repeats. Eventually Minix has been tested enough by the net to send to Prentice-Hall. * Net people upgrade to latest version (considerably before the rest) and they fix bugs / write new commands etc and post them to the net. I hope I'm not labouring the point here. Kill Andy's postings and limit other postings and MINIX stops improving. I think Andy is well aware of this fact, that the net is the Minix test bed. Imagine how you would feel still running MINIX 1.1. Consider that most of the major and minor improvements to MINIX made over the last 2-3 years are user-contributed. Imagine it all halting. >In the United States, a person holds a copyright on any material he >writes, whether or not he registers that material with the copyright >office, and this copyright protects him against others profiting from >his work. I can't believe that the laws in Great Britain are very much >different. Indeed, the US is a (recent) signatory to the Berne Convention, as is Australia and Great Britain. The author of the work holds copyright, whether it is registered or not and whether the (C) Copyright message appears or not. It does not mean that the work may not be redistributed, it means that the Author has the right to limit distribution, in which case there better be some text there stating that limitation. By posting your patch to comp.os.minix you are sending it to thousands of computers and thousands of users all over the world. You have no idea where your work has been sent. It has gone through gateways, onto disks, archive tapes, printouts, CD-ROM, etc.. Some of the systems your work passes through charge money for the specific purpose of accessing comp.os.minix. I.E. your work. If you can't handle that possibility (and the fact that in a pragmatic sense you have SFA control over who does what with your work), then don't post. And if you can handle it, then what is the difference between charging money for a USENET feed and charging money for USENET data some time after it has gone out over the net? >If this company continues, then I suppose that we could restrict >distribution of our articles, so that they only go to North America, >South America, Asia, Africa, and the continent. Perhaps this would piss >off the Brits enough that they would take legal action against this >company in Great Britain. That would be pretty stupid. Do you think this is only a British phenomenon? And technically infeasible, to boot. >---------------------------------------------------------------- >(c) Copyright Kenneth J. Hendrickson, 1990 >No part of this article may be sold, or printed in a publication >which is sold, without the written permission of the author. >---------------------------------------------------------------- Yawn ... I doubt anyone would buy it anyway. Nick. -- ACSnet: nick@ultima.cs.uts.oz UUCP: ...!uunet!munnari!ultima.cs.uts.oz!nick