🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BRENNAN.90Aug10113117@bach.rtp.dg.com>, brennan@rtp (Dave Brennan) writes:
>If I read a book that is not free and apply the information I've learn from
>that book to write some software I choose to make free, how does my
>software contain non-free information?  (I'm assuming here that I don't
>copy code from the manual, or that if I do, the author says that is OK.) 
>
>In earning a degree in Computer Science, I've used a lot of books and
>references, very few which are free.  So, a hefty amount of my knowledge is
>based on non-free information, and therefore a good percentage of any
>software I write is non-free?!?!  If some people want to ignore my work
>becaue they believe using non-free references is a bad idea, it's their
>loss.

If we talk about 'free' vs. 'non-free' as a copyright law issue, the
programs you write are 'free'; that is, they're not a derivative work
of the books you have read (unless, of course, you directly copied
some code or comments from them).  This is because only the expression
of idead is copyrightable, not the ideas themselves.

If we talk about some other meaning of 'free', dunno, you have to
define the meaning first.  Might be that here we're talking about
'free' as used by FSF (rms?) in the GNU make documentation.  I think
the FSF has the definitive word concerning this, anyone from FSF care
to comment ?

However, it seems to me that the FSF doesn't think that ideas derived
from copyrighted works are covered by the copyright, either; I mean,
the name 'GNU is Not Unix' in itself means that GNU is influenced a
lot by Unix, a copyrighted non-free (in both the copyright and GNU
senses of the word) software product.

I think the wording 'we don't refer to non-free information' is
stating the policy that 'non-free' things are not supposed to be
recomended by FSF.  I think that FSF should use the normal academic
standard of included references to all previous work used in writing
the documentation or software; so I think FSF _should_ include the
reference to the AWK book _if_ it was used in writing the
documentation.  As someone suggested before, the preference of free
vs. non-free information could be expressed by ie. different
bibliographies for free and non-free.

//Jyrki