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From: doug@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Douglas W O'neal)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: rms says...
Message-ID: <7459@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 1 Feb 91 14:14:07 GMT
References: <13109@life.ai.mit.edu> <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 27

In article <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:
->In article <13109@life.ai.mit.edu> tmb@ai.mit.edu writes:
->>In article <43377@nigel.ee.udel.edu>, new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes:
->>|> FSF takes
->>|> their entire design, recodes it, and then sells it as their own.  I
->>|> think this is wrong.
->>
->>Most kinds of research results and paradigms are not protected by law.
->
->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"?  

Are you also going to flame Sun, DEC, etc., for their rewrites of UNIX into
their particular OS's.  The differences are that Sun licenses their product
(since it is not a complete rewrite, only 90%) and you have to pay Sun.
-- 
Doug O'Neal, Distributed Systems Programmer, Johns Hopkins University
doug@jhuvms.bitnet, doug@jhuvms.hcf.jhu.edu, mimsy!aplcen!jhunix!doug 
Like many of the features of UNIX, UUCP appears theoretically 
unworkable... - DEC Professional, April 1990