ark%alice@alice.UUCP (05/02/86)
Subject: Re: distributing gnu - let's think about this > I agree, since my company (yes, that is the owner of the Death Star > up there on the organization line) would probably object very strongly > to paying its phone $$$ to ship free Unix-based software around the > world -- I think you can understand why. It's worse that that. I think that employee of many companies won't even be allowed to *use* Gnu. Consider: you are only allowed to use it if you agree that any changes you make will be generally distributed. But your employer quite reasonably wants to be able to withhold from general distribution any work they're paying you for. Impasse!
jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson) (05/19/86)
In article <5373@alice> ark%alice@alice.UUCP writes: >Subject: Re: distributing gnu - let's think about this > >> I agree, since my company (yes, that is the owner of the Death Star >> up there on the organization line) would probably object very strongly > >It's worse that that. I think that employee of many companies won't >even be allowed to *use* Gnu. I recently obtained a copy of BISON (the GNU yacc equivalent). It appears that every C file genrated by BISON contains the GNU copyright. I contacted Richard Stallman to make sure this was not accidental - his reply was that this copyright was included in the generated C source file because it includes a copy of the parser written by him. To the best of my understanding, this implies that I cannot sell any program that uses BISON to generate a parser - In fact, I must be willing to give away that C source. Richard didn't seem very upset when I suggested that I couldn't use BISON if I had to give away the generated C program. In fact, He was quite pleased (something like: He was just as pleased as if a gun he'd manufactured couldn't be used for murder).