dl@ROCKY.OSWEGO.EDU (Doug Lea) (08/12/88)
I have not participated publicly in the recent discussions about the legal ramifications of the GNU license Agreement until now because (1) I am not a lawyer and (2) I find myself in agreement with Stallman's decision to proceed very carefully in deciding whether and how to modify the Agreement to accommodate people who would like to sell works that may or may not be considered as `derived' from GNU software, depending on what `derived' is defined to mean. However, the recent proposal by gilmore and others appears to demand a personal response from me, (not RMS or FSF) as the author of most of GNU libg++. I would like to briefly outline why I support the FSF goals, and specifically, the Agreement, in a way that bears only indirectly on legal principles. I am, primarily, a teacher in a liberal arts college. As such, I stand for the `free' dissemination of ideas. Historically, (please forgive any botching of historical facts to suit my needs, but that's what history is for!) the main tool by which intellectual property has been allowed to be widely disseminated (read `taught') while at the same time both crediting originators, and protecting the works from corruption, misattribution, and so on, has been the notion of Copyright. For these reasons, the introduction of copyright laws is widely considered to have been an important step in accellerating intellectual and scientific progress. Sadly, in the science of computing, this solution has not stood up well. While, in many disciplines, the price of a copyrighted work to be used for study is well within the reach of those who could best benefit from it (e.g., a copy of ``War and Peace'' might be $5, or even $50, but not $50,000), the economics of computing have, for the most part, priced copyrighted software out of the reach of students (and most others). Most readers would agree that the study of high-quality existing programs is among the better methods for learning about the art of programming. These days, one cannot legally show, discuss, and teach from, say, Unix or Lotus source code. I believe that Stallman's notion that the economics of copyright can be separated from its role in the protection and propagation of intellectual property is as good a solution to this dilemna as we are likely to get. There are many of us, especially those of us in academe, who are actually very pleased to devote some time and effort to writing software without any direct monetary compensation. For all sorts of reasons. (For example, in my case, with libg++, as a means to further investigate the pragmatics of object-oriented programming and so on. Or maybe it's just incorrigible hacking. Whatever.) Now I, and many others, I suspect, are not terribly worried about maintaining proper authorship credit, etc., of such work. The reason that the GNU Agreement is attractive is mainly that it keeps accessible the work that I intended to be accessible, but also generally offers all other benefits that Copyright engenders, but that the mere act of placing work in the `public domain' would not. One could make a very strong case that the GNU Agreement benefits people other than students, and perhaps even society as a whole, again in ways that assignment of works to the public domain would not. But I will not argue it out here. It is an unfortunate fact that the GNU Agreement currently stands in the way of such work being used in honest ways by honest programmers who do have to worry about the economic ramifications. I personally hope that exactly the right accomodations are made to allow fair and sensible use while maintaining the ideals that make the GNU solution work. There are many sticky legalistic points involved in doing so. I do hope that Stallman is able to find such a solution soon enough to make alternative approaches less attractive, but not so hastily as to comprimise the goals of FSF (which I am sure he will not do). Please email responses to me. Let's not tie up the net. Doug Lea, Computer Science Dept., SUNY Oswego, Oswego, NY, 13126 (315)341-2367 email: dl@rocky.oswego.edu or dl%rocky.oswego.edu@nisc.nyser.net UUCP :...cornell!devvax!oswego!dl or ...rutgers!sunybcs!oswego!dl