🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May6.154414.19696@alphalpha.com> nazgul@alphalpha.com
(Kee Hinckley) writes:

   But of course arguments always force people to the
   extremes and those of us who think the middle of the road is just
   fine get shunned by both sides.

Ayup.  People have asked me how I can possibly disagree with both the
GNU position and most software patents.  The answer is that I think that
*copyright* law is pretty close to what we need, with modifications or
extensions to take into account the differences between digital media
and traditional media.  That's it.  These extensions do not need to be made
just for software; the same problem comes up when you try and publish
*anything* in a form from which an exact copy can be easily made,
whether it's a program, or a book, or an image, or an audio recording,
or a MIDI data stream, or whatever.

The GNU position works by evading the problem: simply remove property
rights to software.  Now, this actually can work for common (shared)
resources.  General purpose programming tools are a good example, and
GNU Emacs and GCC are wonderful success stories.  The more power to
them.  Anyone should be able to use the GPL and copyleft, if that's what
they want to do with their creation.

Where I disagree is in deciding that this approach solves the problems
instead of just ignoring them...
--
Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
-- 
Implementation is 95% boredom and 5% terror.