🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <9101282011.AA20121@mole.ai.mit.edu> rms@AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) writes:
:Some people are pacifists; they believe in being peaceful even to
:murderers, rapists or tyrants.  It would be fully consistent for a
:pacifist to believe in putting software in the public domain.

That's a rather good (and timely) analogy, which hadn't previously
occurred to me.  Would have been useful, and no doubt still will be in
various discussions.

I've found the copyleft an annoyance at various times myself.  It has
forced me to spend time re-inventing wheels when I knew good code was
sitting on my disk to do that job.  I hate it when that happens.  It
was annoying as all hell.  However, the people who wrote that code
that I wanted to re-use have (ethically, and in my opinion) every
right to put any restrictions they want on my re-use of it.  No matter
how annoyed I get, I cannot bring myself to whine at people who've
taken the trouble to write high-quality code and distribute it under
copyleft.  The worst case, that their restrictions prevent me from
using it for some particular project, are no worse than if they hadn't
done it at all.

:The example of X Windows shows what would happen without the copyleft.

Thank you for formulating this so clearly.  I knew the individual
pieces, but I hadn't thought about them as a whole.  I now have a good
explanation of why Copyleft is *better* than public domain.
Previously, I hadn't been completely sure it was.
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