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From: scott@fred.cs.washington.edu (Scott Northrop)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Because you think I misrepresent RMS, it's OK to misrepresent me?
Message-ID: <10183@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 14 Dec 89 03:37:58 GMT
References: <2558@flatline.UUCP> <4639@sugar.hackercorp.com> <25770F75.3EA@rpi.edu> <1913@texsun.Central.Sun.COM> <1989Dec7.075641.13191@news.acc.Virginia.EDU> <4754@sugar.hackercorp.com> <1989Dec13.200302.26010@eng.umd.edu>
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Reply-To: scott@fred.cs.washington.edu.cs.washington.edu (Scott Northrop)
Organization: tenuous at best
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In article <1989Dec13.200302.26010@eng.umd.edu> stripes@eng.umd.edu (Joshua Osborne) writes:
>In article <4754@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>I'm saying "RMS is leading a movement that is attempting to make people
>>unwittingly lose their intellectual property rights, because he believes that
>>restricting the use of software to people who have paid for it is evil."
>
>That doesn't mean he wants to make it illegal.  In fact I think it may even be
>the same document (or mabie not) that says he want's to change it by
>evelution.  He thinks that GNU software will make (tipical) comercial software
>unprofitable, NOT illegal.

Exactly.  My interpretation of the purpose of the GPL is that it is a
mechanism whereby universally needed tools may be made available to
everybody, and the source code for those tools may not be used in
software that is not similarly available.  So everybody gets to use
the tools, everybody gets the evolutionary improvements to the tools,
and nobody can copy the source code to those tools to make for-profit
software (if you want to sell it, you have to write it.)  The GPL
guarantees that when somebody puts the source to a program out there
and says "this is for everybody", it (and any derivative work) stays
that way.  This is only likely to happen for very very popular tools.

If you spend three months writing some huge esoteric program unlike
anything written, for a projected user base of a couple thousand,
nobody is going to expect you to slap the GPL on that program.  You
worked hard to write a tool for those people to use, and they should
pay you for that work.  Lots of work, few people benefit, and they get
a tool they didn't have before.

Many good programmers enjoy making universally useful tools just to
advance the state of the art, and (if philosophically inclined) to
put them under the GPL.  Few will be interested in making a
specialized tool with a limited audience for free, so there will
always be a living to be made writing specialized software.  Nobody
wants to force all of the software written to be put under the GPL.

If I've grossly missed the boat here, do let me know, but I don't think so...

Scott Northrop                                scott@fred.cs.washington.edu