🚀 go-pugleaf

My contribution to this thread has been just about beaten to death,
especially considering that I was only trying to make a very small
point, namely that for some people releasing software under the GPL
(as opposed to public domain) is A Good Thing.  My point was not based
on principle, nor on theories of how people act, but on an actual
event in the real world.

jesse@franklin.com (Jesse Perry) writes:

>The GPL could not have improved this situation in the slightest,
>although it could easily have made it worse.  Since we assume the
>company released this product to grab a quick buck, we can certainly
>conclude that had NOS been GPL'ed, THEY WOULDN'T HAVE USED IT.	Their
>goal was to make money selling the program -- so anything with
>requirements in conflict with that goal (e.g., GPL'ed code) would
>not be tolerated.

While not an unreasonable assumption, it turns out to be false for
this particular example.  Alpha Micro is primarily a hardware company,
although they also sell a wide range of software, and people were
bugging them for some sort of TCP/IP product so that they could
transfer files back and forth between Unix systems and Alpha Micros.
NOS was their stopgap solution until they could release real TCP/IP
support (which they still haven't done, a state of affairs that may be
partially due to my refusal to sign the nondisclosure agreement
required by the third party TCP/IP vendor whose code they wanted to
port, but I'm not sure I can manage to spin that out into support of
the GPL).

As I noted in another post they are distributing my port of gcc,
because people were bugging them for an ANSI C compiler.
-- 
Ian Taylor                 ian@airs.com                 uunet!airs!ian
First person to identify this quote wins a free e-mail message:
``Hagenbeck sent a special expedition to Lake Bangweolo; unfortunately
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