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From: markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Public Domain vs. Copyrighted
Message-ID: <4410@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-Apr-87 14:28:32 EST
Article-I.D.: sdcrdcf.4410
Posted: Wed Apr  8 14:28:32 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 13-Apr-87 03:51:25 EST
References: <8704031442.AA25937@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <1090@cci632.UUCP>
Reply-To: markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar)
Distribution: world
Organization: Unisys - System Development Group, Santa Monica
Lines: 19

In article <1090@cci632.UUCP> rb@ccird2.UUCP (Rex B) writes:
|The nice thing about "copyleft" is that it prevents someone from making
|"propriatery improvements" without the copyright owners permission.
|...
|The main disadvantage to "copyleft" is that it does prevent others from
|making new products that might have a wider appeal.  If Richard says
|...
|In general, with "public domain", one may mix "public" and "proprietary"
|with impunity, while with "copyleft", "copyleft" and "proprietary" must
|be kept almost entirely mutually exclusive.

It seems to me that you could sell any type of proprietary changes to GNU
software in the form of "ed scripts" which do not contain any of the
original source.  You could even get fancy and have the change data be
encrypted in some way and provide a magic binary program that did the
changes to the GNU binary.

Mark Biggar
{allegra,burdvax,cbosgd,hplabs,ihnp4,akgua,sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!markb