oz@yetti.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) (12/16/85)
If what RMS is saying is true about the earlier dist. of Montgomery's emacs is true, could someone find out the legalities involved, and post the sources for it to the net ?? To my knowledge, once something is PD, it is PD !! Later versions may not be so, but the earlier ones without copyright notices etc. (especially without AT&T's "it is ours, we wrote it, you cannot even breathe a line out of the sources or we'll sue your pants off.. there !!!" type notice :-)) would definately be in the PD. Sure, jove is a nice alternative, but it contains ED reg. expr. stuff, and some temp.io. portions of VI. Also, it is not terribly expandable. Why is it that in light of the existence of GNU emacs, and number of other poverful emacses, even an earlier version of monty's emacs cause so much contraversy ?? Why is it that some companies are so afraid of letting anything go into PD ?? Check out the recent getopt sources.. now a 20-line program, originally distributed in printout form in a symposium, bears a copyright notice as large as the sources themselves. I guess this is what "comic relief" means. sigh !! Oz -- Usenet: [decvax|allegra|linus|ihnp4]!utzoo!yetti!oz Bitnet: oz@[yusol|yuyetti] In the beginning, there was Word all right, except it wasn't fixed number of bits.
pooh@unirot.UUCP (Pooh) (12/19/85)
Think about it a minute. If you put a product into the public
domain, that means no one has to pay for that product. If it
happens to be your product, you don't make any money from it.
How would you like it if someone took something that you had
worked on very hard and was planning to make a living from,
and declared that through some technicality, everyone could
have it and no one had to pay you for it?
You don't have to buy a product if you don't like its price.
But you certainly have no right to take away someone's livelihood.
If you feel differently about this, then I suggest you go to your
employer and tell him that he no longer has to pay you wages for
the code you write for him.
Pooh topaz!unirot!pooh
topaz!unipress!poohoz@yetti.UUCP (Ozan Yigit) (12/22/85)
In article <252@unirot.UUCP> pooh@unirot.UUCP (Pooh) writes: > >Think about it a minute. If you put a product into the public >domain, that means no one has to pay for that product. If it >happens to be your product, you don't make any money from it. > So what ??? If I have 10 products, and 2 of them are released to PD, because I may think that it is good PR, or maybe I care more about what other people get than just making money, where is the great loss ??? >How would you like it if someone took something that you had >worked on very hard and was planning to make a living from, >and declared that through some technicality, everyone could >have it and no one had to pay you for it? > To my knowledge, Warren Montgomery never intended to make money out of his emacs. And nobody has taken anything from him, nor anybody will. As he clerified in a previous posting, his emacs is NOT PD, nor will it ever be, unless AT&T has a major overhaul in style. BUT IF IT WAS PD, it would not be a "technicality". Nothing becomes PD, unless it is declared by a court as such, or declared by the author/innovator as such. > >You don't have to buy a product if you don't like its price. >But you certainly have no right to take away someone's livelihood. > You sound as if someone has just taken away someone's livelyhood. I was merely questioning the status of Montgomery Emacs. It was cleared up later. >If you feel differently about this, then I suggest you go to your >employer and tell him that he no longer has to pay you wages for >the code you write for him. > My paycheck says that they do not !! :-) All this trivia aside, I am sure you will see other emacs-like editors in the public domain, or released in source-level with copyright, as in GNU Emacs. You see, if people want to have their editor in the source form, at the cost of the distribution media, they will get it no matter what any software company tries to do. (I do not imply stealing, disassembling or any such legally questionable means) GNU is just a start. Oz -- Usenet: [decvax|allegra|linus|ihnp4]!utzoo!yetti!oz Bitnet: oz@[yusol|yuyetti] In the beginning, there was Word all right, except it wasn't fixed number of bits.
tp@ndm20 (01/01/86)
>Why is it that in light of the existence of GNU emacs, and number of >other poverful emacses, even an earlier version of monty's emacs cause >so much contraversy ?? Alas, some of us don't have gnu emacs, for reasons other than lack of wanting it. It may or may not run on SysV yet (I've been out of touch for a while). If it does run on SysV, it probably hasn't been ported to my machine yet (masscomp). I don't have time to do the port. Even if it has been, since I don't have a tape drive, nobody will send it to me anyway (only a masscomp with a cassette drive could produce media I could use, and as I said, I don't think it runs on Masscomp). So, I'm whining. The point is that just because something is free and public domain doesn't mean that everyone should have it. Some of us don't have vaxes. Some of us don't have 4.2. Some of us don't have tape drives, or internet access. There are a lot of PD programs I'd like to have, like TeX, RCS, MH or MMDF and Gnumacs. But I have to live with nroff, sccs, the V7 mailer, and Unipress emacs (which can only laughingly be said to run on a Masscomp, but it will edit a file if you don't use any packages, and if you can figure out the trick it takes to make it run in a Masscomp window, and if you ...)(All the above despite the fact that I was promised a fixed version 6 months ago, 3 months ago, ... they don't answer my email any more...) Thanks, Terry Poot Nathan D. Maier Consulting Engineers (214)739-4741 Usenet: ...!{allegra|ihnp4}!convex!smu!ndm20!tp CSNET: ndm20!tp@smu ARPA: ndm20!tp%smu@csnet-relay.ARPA