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From: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Selling of free software
Message-ID: <1990Aug8.173146.1206@santra.uucp>
Date: 8 Aug 90 17:31:46 GMT
References: <5414@castle.ed.ac.uk> <26259@usc.edu> <26149@nigel.udel.EDU> <6--4A8C@xds13.ferranti.com>
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Reply-To: jkp@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 46
In-Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva)

In article <6--4A8C@xds13.ferranti.com>, peter@ficc (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I wrote a soft shareware program for the Amiga called "browser". After
>a while, I recieved mail from someone in Germany to the effect that someone
>was selling a disk that contained several such programs for more than the
>$5 that Fred Fish charges for his Amiga PD collection, with the implication
>that I should be horrified at his abuse of my work.
>
>I'm afraid that I disappointed this worthy gentleman, because I really
>didn't care. So long as the package stayed together so my begging letter
>was included, I didn't care if they required a 5 year indenture to get my
>code.

I don't mind that situation either; what I _do_ mind if I post /
publish some code to the public domain, then someone else comes and
(perhaps improving the code somewhat, perhaps deleting my name,
perhaps omiting documentation and source, perhaps doing something
else) starts selling the code so that the buyer of that program isn't
allowed to redistribute.

I think Minix is a very good service to the community, but I see some
of the above scene happening with Minix (or perhaps it's my
misunderstanding).  I think there's a lot of user-contribued stuff
distributed with Minix.  The authors have allowed free use of that
stuff, fine.  But I suppose all the software in Minix comes with
Prentice-Hall copyright, so you aren't allowed to redistribute that
free stuff, either, if you got it with Minix, right ?  Please tell me
I'm wrong.

That's what I think is a very good aspect of the GNU copyright.  It
guarantees all the users / redistributers the right to get
_everything_ of the original work easily and takes away the
possibility of a third party taking this freedom away.

For these reasons, if I'll make some sizable contributions to Minix
(or any other effort-taking software development for that matter),
I'll probably put them under the GNU copyright.  This may mean that
Prentice-Hall won't put them in the official distribution, but the
improvements (if they're not too much dependent on Minix) are
available for use by free software developers easily, ie. someone can
port them to GNU OS or something else to be freely distributable.  If
I just give them to the public domain, it easily happens that someone
takes the software and restricts it's redistribution (like happens
currently with X, TeX, Scribe (if I remember right), Ingres, Berkeley
version of Unix etc.)

//Jyrki