🚀 go-pugleaf

I have thought about this "copylefting" business quite a bit lately.  T.
Parr and I are on the verge of releasing Antlr (an extended-BNF LL(1)
compiler-compiler which is part of his MS thesis), so it has been more than
a theoretical concern....

When I first saw the info on copylefting I thought to myself, "Well, that
should stop the scum from selling what we did for free."  However, I have
since seen that "the scum" don't really care if it is copylefted -- which
only makes sense, because none of them ever seemed to care about copyrights
before.  They know that prosecution is mostly an empty threat.

I have also seen that copylefts send a shudder down the spine of nearly
every major corporation. Since they fear that they'll accidentally lose
rights to some vital piece of in-house developed software by some nieve
employee using a copylefted tool, many companies simply refuse to touch
copylefted software...  they will not even allow it on their machines.

The propagation of copyleft rights via use of copylefted tools is an absurd
power trip:  imagine a fellow inventing a new type of nail and then claiming
ownership/control of all houses built using at least one such nail because
the assemblage of the house is fundamentally the use of the nails, not a
function of the lumber used.  This certainly violates the spirit of pure
academic research as I see it; all we're supposed to want is proper credit
for our good work, not a claim on somebody else's efforts.

Hence, I've slowly become convinced that true "public domain" (PD) is the
only way to go -- perhaps augmenting this by establishing a user group at
the time of release.  Companies are a very large and important user
community, and I don't want to exclude them from using our software.
Further, if we publicize the PD software enough, few people will pay big
money for a commercial rip-off of it (maybe somebody else will get rich off
of our work, but in some sense that's what academia is all about ;-).

Anyway, here's what I think we will be doing:  a pure PD release with a
credit/modification history which must be maintained, but which carries no
further rights.  In other words, people would be free to sell modified
versions of our software...  but they must acknowledge the lineage of their
product in some way.  I'm not quite sure of the details...  but it shouldn't
be anything that would frighten away any potential users.  And that's what
this is all about.

						-hankd@ecn.purdue.edu