🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1686@tharr.UUCP> gtoal@tharr.UUCP (Graham Toal) writes:

   I think a real free market economy is going to mean that people will start
   producing software which is *truly* free, in rival to the Gnu project.
   A sad waste of effort, but I'm sure it will happen.  (Indeed, it already
   has - the Bsd4.3 people went out of their way to avoid Gnu code when
   shaking off the last AT&T shackles recently)

The software isn't *truly* free except to become proprietary, which GNU
software isn't.  If BSD4.3 people went out of their way to avoid GNU code
for reasons having to do with "freedom", then I suspect it was because
they ultimately want people to incorporate their code in proprietary
products (i.e. *not*-free BSD4.3), whether that was a direct motivation
or, perhaps, a motivation in making their ground rules be to release it in
the public domain.  Or perhaps there are some governmental-funding
requirements requiring release of software into the public domain that they
must avoid transgressing.  (If that's the case, we should get the
government to allow GPL as an alternative to public domain release, since
it better achieves that which was probably the original goal -- to make
sure the code never got into proprietary products and hence became less
than free.)

Also, I can't understand why people would want to spend so much time and
effort making a public domain product for free just to rival the GNU
project, when they're going to be, as a result, much less able to earn
an income by supporting that product on all the systems it'll end up
running on (because most of them will be shipped in proprietary form without
source code), and their reputations might well be tarnished when lousy
porting jobs are done without their ability to see what went wrong and
fix it, and the poor users, if they've even been told the product was
derived from the original work, will probably decide never to use software
by the original programmer again.  At least with FSF software, if someone
someday does a lousy port of GNU Fortran and releases it, as soon as people
complain to me, I have the option of (either for free or if someone hires
me to do it) improving the port by obtaining the pertinent source code,
figuring out what they did, and fixing it or redoing it given the
knowledge contained in the code.  I won't have to disassemble their code
(which is not only time-consuming but, according to most licenses I've
read for proprietary software, illegal).
--

James Craig Burley, Software Craftsperson    burley@ai.mit.edu