Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!paperboy!meissner From: meissner@osf.org (Michael Meissner) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: rms says... Message-ID: Date: 1 Feb 91 15:29:28 GMT References: <13109@life.ai.mit.edu> <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Sender: news@OSF.ORG Organization: Open Software Foundation Lines: 27 In-reply-to: new@ee.udel.edu's message of 1 Feb 91 05:16:14 GMT In article <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes: | I realize that these things are legal. I just think it's wrong. I | also don't know that it encourages *new* work very much. I may be | wrong, but I don't know of anything that FSF has published that isn't a | clone of somebody else's work. I wouldn't at all object to seeing | something new truely published as FSFware, but I don't think that's | going to happen very often. Building on history to produce new | scientific works is one thing; directly reimplementing a program such | that you can even use the same manual page is not it. In what way is | this "advancing science"? Of course how do you classify GNU emacs? RMS was the original author, of course they didn't have GNU back then. Also, while it's not written by a FSF'er, Perl is distributed under the copyleft, and the FSF redistributes it, and it's not a clone of a single program (more like an irish stew of different languages). And of course you don't use BSD or System V personally, because they are clones of the original UNIX'es from AT&T...... -- Michael Meissner email: meissner@osf.org phone: 617-621-8861 Open Software Foundation, 11 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA, 02142 Considering the flames and intolerance, shouldn't USENET be spelled ABUSENET?