Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!comp.vuw.ac.nz!nickson From: Ray.Nickson@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Ray Nickson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog Subject: Re: Updates to Edinburgh Tools Message-ID: Date: 26 Feb 91 13:49:21 GMT References: <9102201446.AA13830@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <4819@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> Sender: news@comp.vuw.ac.nz (News Admin) Organization: Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand Lines: 47 Nntp-Posting-Host: turakirae.comp.vuw.ac.nz In-Reply-To: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au's message of 25 Feb 91 07:34:01 GMT In article <4819@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes: Quintus has no debt to the public-domain library. ... and then explains that he and others now at Quintus wrote most of it. I do not believe there is any such thing as a debt (legal or moral) to the public domain. By putting a work into the public domain the author grants complete freedom to use it without any legal constraint, and usually with few moral constraints. If you (that's you generally, not Richard, I know his opinion!) want a *free* Prolog library, then write or commission one, and use the copyright law to make sure it remains free. You could even base it on the DEC10 library souce (with appropriate credits, if _your_ morals demand that). I list below the library files that I have written to the Quintus specification (without using the DEC10 library), and am working on others in my spare time and as I need them. Of course, this approach means you risk losing the correctness and efficiency that you pay for with Quintus and that you probably get from the PD libraries through long use. In case you didn't guess by the rhetoric above, these all have a GNU style copyright and license agreement (`copyleft') on them. If you want them, I can email to you personally; unless there's an overwhelming response (unlikely!), I'd prefer not to distribute generally (yet). (Some of these are not complete, and a few predate my decision to follow the Quintus spec). arg.pl basics.pl builtin.pl change_arg.pl curses.pl freevars.pl gensort.pl listparts.pl lists.pl occurs.pl ordsets.pl same_functor.pl sets.pl