Path: utzoo!telly!philmtl!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!janus.Berkeley.EDU!jbuck
From: jbuck@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Re: Actual case of hoarding public domain code?
Message-ID: <33212@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 14 Dec 89 20:29:26 GMT
References: <129245@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: jbuck@janus.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Joe Buck)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 33

In article <129245@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> rfm@sun.com (Rich McAllister) writes:
>The justification for copyleft rather than just putting free software in the
>public domain seems to be "if it's not copyrighted, some Evil Hoarder could
>take it, make some trivial changes, copyright it, and then sue all the
>people who use the original PD product, or derive code from it."
>
>Does anyone know of a case where this actually happened?

Sure.  Unipress Emacs.

It had been distributed all other the net (it was known as Gosling's
Emacs), then Gosling sold his rights to Unipress, and the story came
out that it was only released to a few close friends of Gosling's and
no one else had any rights to it.  While I don't know of any suits that
came out of this, there were a lot of threats.

Of course this case is a little different because Gosling was the author.
But many others (notably Chris Torek) made lots of improvements to the
code -- the University of Maryland enhanced version was distributed
widely -- so the product definitely benefitted by being a publically
distributed beast.  Still, if anyone has a copy of Unipress Emacs,
look at all the names of well known netters in the code.  Unipress is,
to a large extent, selling their work.  (I do want to applaud Unipress
for distributing source code for a not-too-unaffordable price).

To be fair, I don't think Unipress actually attempted to stop people
from using old (pre-Unipress) versions.  But I've seen the bullshit story
about Gosling's "few close friends" in the trade press recently.  This
isn't just a mistake, it's a deliberate distortion.

--
Joe "disgustingly happy" Buck
jbuck@janus.berkeley.edu	 {uunet,ucbvax}!janus.berkeley.edu!jbuck