Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!ee.udel.edu From: new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: rms says... Message-ID: <44020@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Date: 7 Feb 91 17:29:06 GMT References: <13109@life.ai.mit.edu> <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <7459@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu Organization: University of Delaware Lines: 56 Nntp-Posting-Host: snow-white.ee.udel.edu In article <7459@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> doug@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Douglas W O'neal) writes: >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. I was just going to let this die, having said my say, but several people also brought this up in email. My gripe is not only that "rms" takes other people's designs, but that he does not liscence them from the originators (as Sun does). Also, and PRIMARILY, he states something along the lines of "I don't like people who take something free, like TeX, modify it to work better or on a different computer, and then sell it, since TeX is free." But what does he do instead? He takes somebody's design, which wouldn't be free if copyright laws were interpreted more librally, rewrites it, and sells it without paying anything to the designer. He lets the designers of a new product take all the financial risks and spend all the development costs, and then because designs cannot be protected, he can rewrite it and give it away. Even if Sun didn't pay AT&T, I doubt that they would say "Well, out of the goodness of our heart, we avoided any AT&T code so that you don't have to pay that evil nasty company for their UNIX." Clearly neither Adobe nor ParcPlace wish to give away their designs; this has been clear from day one. Knuth decided to give away TeX. Now RMS complains that people are using TeX and making money off it without paying Knuth, but then uses Adobe's and XEROX's resources to design and market a product which he then takes the design for and rewrites. GNU Smalltalk an Ghostscript would never have been written for/by FSF if Adobe and XEROX had not invested large sums of money. And RMS complains that people make money off of what other people are *giving away*. That is the hypocrasy which I object to. I would not object nearly as much if RMS said "Since I like to have source and most commercial releases don't include source, I'm reimplementing it myself because the designs cannot be legally protected. With enough work, every company will make source available or fear that I will take their design and give away for free a competing product." How many companies would invent new stuff if FSF *in advance* said "if you write this, we will rewrite it and give it away free within six months"? Look at something like PacMan or Tetris. Either of these is trivial to implement. The difficult part is the original creative design and the marketing, and since FSF does not need to pay for either of these, they can afford to produce quality software for free. Anybody who has done and major systems knows that the design is more than half the battle; if you had all the user's manuals and an example system in front of you, duplicating it would be comparatively easy. Yet FSF behaves as if those evil companies paying for all that R&D and marketing are nasty because they don't give him source, and his response is to ride their coattails. The hypocracy is what I object to, and if he wasn't hypocritical, I suspect much (but not all) of his work would find much less support. -- Darren -- --- Darren New --- Grad Student --- CIS --- Univ. of Delaware --- ----- Network Protocols, Graphics, Programming Languages, Formal Description Techniques (esp. Estelle), Coffee, Amigas ----- =+=+=+ Let GROPE be an N-tuple where ... +=+=+=