🚀 go-pugleaf

Perhaps the motivation for the FSF's current copyleft policy isn't made clear
enough in the various distribution files.

RMS was a housemate of mine 8-9 years ago, back when Emacs was written in
Teco for ITS and the DEC-20 and it was just getting ported to other systems
(Gosling, et al, under Unix).  He was incredibly frustrated at how people
kept ripping off his software and selling it for massive royalties.  Though
the name "emacs" became a household word, it was no longer free on many
systems and it no longer represented RMS' views.

By the time the FSF was created, this lesson had already been well-learned:
the point is to create a massive set of building-block tools so the state
of the art will be advanced by people building on top of them, rather than
kept in one place by people constantly trying to make a buck building
basic systems.

In order to keep the software in the public domain and available on the
largest variety of systems, the copyleft was invented.  And it's become a
very sensible way of motivating people to port the software to new systems
without trying to make a fast buck off of it.

The way to make money on Gnu software is to provide guaranteed support so
companies can use it easily, reliably, and across a variety of platforms.
Not to take a copy of it, port it to some new system, and sell it.

Another side benefit of the copyleft has been to create a series of de facto
standards which are superior to those put forth by some other organizations.
This is thanks to the reduced time-to-market created by the Gnu distribution
media:  state-of-the-art advances appear much more rapidly in Gnu software
than, for example, in that of Lotus, Apple, OSF, or Microsoft, to name a few
names.

-rich