Xref: utzoo alt.religion.computers:1162 gnu.misc.discuss:578
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!bu-cs!lll-winken!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uhnix1!splut!jay
From: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: Disinfecting the GNU Public Virus...er...License
Message-ID: <4&VSZ:@splut.conmicro.com>
Date: 19 Dec 89 16:06:37 GMT
Reply-To: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard)
Organization: Confederate Microsystems, League City, TX
Lines: 78


There's been a lot of discussion about the GNU Public License. I, along
with a few others, have decried the part of the license that forces a
software author who uses any part of GNU code to make his entire package
available under the terms of the License, which requires that he make
the complete source code available for only a copying charge and
prohibits him from protecting his own code by imposing any greater
restrictions than those contained in the License.

The part of the License that does this is paragraph 2b:

    b) cause the whole of any work that you distribute or publish, that
    in whole or in part contains the Program or any part thereof, either
    with or without modifications, to be licensed at no charge to all
    third parties under the terms of this General Public License (except
    that you may choose to grant warranty protection to some or all
    third parties, at your option).

This is a legal virus, as insidious and as evil as the (all too common)
computer virus.  It forces anyone who wishes to use GNU code in his
program to subscribe to Richard M. Stallman's utopia. 

How is this harmful? Let's take a recent example: Someone posted a
version of GNU's getopt() that he had modified to accept / as well as -
as the switch character to alt.sources - without including a copy of the
GNU Public License.  While I understand and agree that this was a dirty,
rotten thing to do, and he should not have done it, and that he should
be strung up, keelhauled, drawn, quartered, minced, buried in warm peat
for three months, and then boiled in oil, let's look at another effect
of this: the effect on some poor slob who innocently snarfs a copy of
the code and builds it into his life's work. 

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so the user of the code is still
covered by the terms of the GNU Public License. Presto! Without knowing
it, he's just obligated himself to giving away the source code to
WhizzoCalc, and prevented himself from keeping others from giving it
away, forever.

This is theft.

What should be done about it?

I call upon the Free Software Foundation to issue a new version of the
GNU Public License, with paragraph 2b replaced by the following:

    b) cause those portions of any work that you distribute or publish
    that are portions of the Program, either with or without modification,
    to be licensed at no charge to all third parties under the terms of
    this General Public License (except that you may choose to grant
    warranty protection to some or all third parties, at your option).

At one stroke, this would disinfect the virus. No longer would we have
to freely distribute our code just because we used GNU regexp, for
example. If we modify GNU code, that modified code would still be
available, under the same terms that guarantee that everyone can still
have a copy. Nobody could sabotage a programming project's commercial
viability by slipping in some GNU code. In short, we would be free not
to join in RMS' utopia.

I also note that you cannot include this replacement on your own in a
license you wish to apply to your own independently developed code,
because of the following language at the head of the GNU Public License:

 Copyright (C) 1989 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
                    675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
 of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

Therefore, fixing this can only be done by the FSF itself.

Finally, I do not get the gnu.* groups here; if you cannot post to
alt.religion.computers, please email me a copy of your comments.

-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL   | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jay@splut.conmicro.com       (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity.
{attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +----------------------------------------
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