🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4792@internal.Apple.COM> desnoyer@apple.com (Peter Desnoyers) writes:

>
>How many machines do you think GCC would have been ported to if it were 
>public domain? Probably about as many as now; maybe a few more. How many 
>of these ports would you be able to use? Whichever ones the FSF wrote - 
>VAX and 68xxx (I think). Period. The rest of them would be proprietary. 
>That is probably a good example of the rationale behind the copyleft, as 
>well as some of its results.
>

Can you back up this assertion? Can you document that the preponderance
of ports have been done by companies rather than individuals?

This is my something like monthly showing in the FSF lions den, though
lately it has tended to take place in comp.lang.c++.

So i'll make my semi-usual two points and go back to work:

1) In The Real World, the apparent complexity of the copyleft coupled
with the unstable state of copyright law makes FSF software
practically unusuable for many companies, whatever their sentiments
about "free" software. So if you really want it to be usuable, 
go public domain. 

2) The FSF isn't about making a publicly available pool of software.
Its about changing the economy of software development to conform to a
never-existent golden age that RMS thinks existed at the MIT AI lab.

(question: what widely used piece of software (that is, by real people,
not by programmers) was ever developed at a University? If you
can name one, are you quite sure it wasn't cleaned up by an evil
software hoarder on the way to utility?)

I can see why companies might sign up to this program: imagine the
advantages to those MBA's if programmers were cheap labor, working 
for the love of the activity? 

I can also imagine that some number of people out there are sincere
socialists, believing in collective ownership of everything,
especially software.

But if you, the reader of this message, aren't in one of those categories,
you should read RMS's political writings and ask yourself whether the
convienience of "free" software today is worth the chains of economic
dependence tomorrow.


-- 
Benson I. Margulies