Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!dan-hankins
From: dan-hankins@cup.portal.com (Daniel B Hankins)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: FREE Software, PD, and author compensation
Message-ID: <12748@cup.portal.com>
Date: 18 Dec 88 20:43:49 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 84

In article <5866@thorin.cs.unc.edu> bell@unc.cs.unc.edu (Andrew Bell)
writes:

>Company A?  Who are they to fire you?  :-)

Whoops! :-) Reminds me of the guy who counted off the points of his
argument "1", "2", "C"...  I meant company X would fire me, of course.

>That's the price of signing your life away to IBM...

Or most other companies.  Every computer company I have worked for had a
non-disclosure/intellectual property agreement that looked exactly like
IBM's.  I call them "We own your brain" agreements.  Most if not all
computer companies have them.  It's just that some companies are more
aggressive about interpretation than others.  IBM today is a highly
litigous company with an adversarial relationship between management and
employees.

IBM once fired an employee for being married to an employee of a competing
company!  Of course, the employee eventually won the lawsuit against IBM,
but it does show the attitude.  And I think this happens to almost every
computer company that gets large enough to have lots of lawyers,
accountants and MBAs running it.

I assure you that the moment it became known that I was cooperating with a
person from DEC to write software for either them or for us, we would both
be fired.  Let's face it:  information sharing between companies is a big
no-no, save in cases like OSF where the participants have huge legal
documents to cover their soft parts.

I don't like the intellectual property agreements either.  I would very
much like to know what happened to the Berne convention that came before
Congress earlier this year.  Was it tabled, passed, or passed with the
amendment IBM was lobbying for (namely, to remove the part that says you
can't sign away your intellectual rights)?

>>The group members get to submit ideas for new programs, and to vote on
>>new programs (and money to write them) on a local, regional, and national
>>level.
>
>So what is stopping people?  There's nothing illegal about doing this.

No, there isn't.  I think that the major things stopping people from doing
this are:

1. Very few people have thought of it (Richard M. Stallman and myself, that
   I know of - and it seems our ideas are quite different).

2. The current system has a lot of momentum - it's quite entrenched.  It's
   often a lot easier to simply do things the way they've always done it.

3. Things have not yet reached the stage where only one license of a
   program is sold and all the rest is pirated.  In such a situation, the
   *only* way for software people to get money would be a scheme such as
   mine or Stallman's.

4. Nobody who has thought of it has tried it yet.

>The problem with your idea is that it is just as easy to not pay and get
>the benefits as it is to pay,  so most people won't.

How does this differ from the current system?  I, and everyone I have
known, have not ever had the slightest difficulty getting pirated copies of
software, when such is desired.

>The loss of voice in what gets produced is countered by the fact that:
>a)  things of general interest will get produced anyay;
>b)  if it is of a much more specialized interest,  the group probably won't
>    vote to produce it.

Hmm.  That sounds like a transitional problem to me.  Also, it is not
necessary that the group commission only one program;  Money can be
allocated to projects in proportion to their popularity or how much people
are willing to pay for them.

Perhaps the usergroup idea is a flop.  Perhaps it would be better if the
software people did it similar to the way the Altair people did their
project, or the way the West Coast Computer Faire was started - advertise
first, collect orders (and money), and then produce the product.  There is
nothing illegal about that if one does not mislead the customers into
believing the product has already been built.


Dan Hankins