Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!pa.dec.com!bacchus!mwm From: mwm@pa.dec.com (Mike (My Watch Has Windows) Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: rms says... Message-ID: Date: 7 Feb 91 21:41:24 GMT References: <13109@life.ai.mit.edu> <43397@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <7459@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <44020@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Sender: news@pa.dec.com (News) Organization: Missionaria Phonibalonica Lines: 44 In-Reply-To: new@ee.udel.edu's message of 7 Feb 91 17:29:06 GMT In article <44020@nigel.ee.udel.edu> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes: 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). There are a number of companies that have written AT&T-free Unices. None of them have made a noticable dent, even though a number of them sold systems (at one time, one of them claimed to have more licenses than AT&T). Are you going to roast them on the same burner as rms, or is it just his reusing designs while claiming that turning PD software proprietary is bad? 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." I suspect he never said any such thing (you got an actual quote somewhere?), but said that he didn't like people taking free software, and turning it into something proprietary. That's not hypcritic with design reuse; it's a recasting of the same philosophy in different terms - that software should be free to anyone who wants it. if you had all the user's manuals and an example system in front of you, duplicating it would be comparatively easy. You've just described how a critical piece of software in a majority of the computers being sold these days was developed. It's called the "clean-room" technic, and most IBM PC clones use a BIOS that was developed that way. Those people turned the IBM PC market into a commodity market, which drove down the prices of lots of things you can hang off of those machines, and made for a software base that makes anything predating it seem pitiful. It also drove down the price of _other_ computers and their software, as they have to compete against much cheaper machines with a much broader software base. The inability to protect design - at least in this case - was a major benefit to society.