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From: rb@cci632.UUCP (Rex Ballard)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Public Domain vs. Copyrighted
Message-ID: <1134@cci632.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 21-Apr-87 18:08:47 EST
Article-I.D.: cci632.1134
Posted: Tue Apr 21 18:08:47 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 22-Apr-87 05:49:48 EST
References: <1090@cci632.UUCP> <4410@sdcrdcf.UUCP>
Reply-To: rb@ccird2.UUCP (Rex B)
Distribution: world
Organization: CCI, Communications Systems Division, Rochester, NY
Lines: 41

In article <4410@sdcrdcf.UUCP| markb@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Mark Biggar) writes:
|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

To a certain degree, this is true.  Just as "patches" are sold for MS-DOS,
any other copyrighted software, GNU could similarly be patched.  However,
GNU also carries some liscence provisions, as well as a copyright.  Read
the GNU liscence agreement.  These are conditions you agree to in exchange
for permission to copy the materials.

Of course, the biggest problem with "patches" is that many things "move
around" from release to release, and with GNU's "weekly release schedule",
it gets very difficult to do patches which do not contain ANY source (remember
sed regular expressions and diff files require some source).

Of course, there are ways to write "hooks" to proprietary code.  Special
key bindings for practially any terminal is an example.  The code inside
the terminal is proprietary, but the bindings aren't.  Similarly, calling
the various proprietary commands from the shell is also a use of "hooks" to
proprietary code.

Even in these examples, Richard or the FSF could prohibit certain types of
hooks if they made the base product (Emacs for example) unusable without the
proprietary code.  Richard, have you ever had to stop someone from doing this?

Rex B.