Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!ames!haven!uvaarpa!murdoch!astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU!gl8f
From: gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Money and the MINIX Centre
Message-ID: <1990Aug2.184038.10871@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 2 Aug 90 18:40:38 GMT
References: <7218@star.cs.vu.nl>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 50

In article <7218@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:

>Now the second point: money.  There has been an enormous discussion
>about the morality of making money from other people's work.  As a
>university researcher, I find this a bit strange because I am constantly
>publishing papers full of ideas which other people can, and sometimes do,'
>adopt to create or enhance their products, which they sell for money.
>Nobody around here finds that peculiar.
>
>What strikes me as odd is that Richard Stallman has somehow convinced
>people that the morally correct way to deal with a valuable and expensive-
>to-produce-item (software) is to give it away free.

Actually, you and rms are closer than you think. You are allowed to
charge whatever you can get for distributing FSF programs. You are
allowed to charge whatever you can get for supporting FSF programs.
You just can't stop your customers from giving away the supported,
patched versions.

If someone wanted to do what the Minix Centre does for GNU stuff, it's
totally legal. And someone does: Cygnus Support, run by the guy who
wrote g++. In the final analysis, the only difference between GNU and
you is that you get a tiny royalty payment from Prentis-Hall for each
copy of Minix sold, and Minix owners can only give away Minix to a
small number of friends instead of all their friends.

Which system is better? Well, some of the stuff in Minix was written
by random people who received no royalties. Seems that they don't mind
that they were not paid royalties for their work.

> I don't see socialism (i.e., FSF) as occupying the high moral ground
> here, not to mention the fact that it is hardly workable on a large
> scale.

Given that the FSF encourages people to make money off their stuff in
certain ways, calling them "socialists" is very simplistic. Perhaps
this is the result of the Ronald Raygun era -- "Gee, they sure look
funny, they must be commie scum!"

I hope P-H decides to sue that asshole who's stealing your work, btw.
And I also hope that someday I'll be able to get a copy of the Amoeba
source without having to fork over big bucks, so I can just read it.
Knowing you, there will be some method, and I'm glad you make the
effort. But if the FSF were handling it, I'd be able to ftp it today.

(Please don't see this as a flame, I do appreciate your liberal stand
 concerning copyrights and Minix.)

--
"In fact you should not be involved in IRC." -- Phil Howard