jr@PEBBLES.BBN.COM (John Robinson) (05/27/88)
I thought this mesage from another list might be of interest. /jr jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr ------- Forwarded Message Date: 25 May 88 03:34:21 +0000 From: rms@WHEATIES.AI.MIT.EDU (Richard Stallman) Subject: (none) Subject [gnu@hoptoad.uucp: Re: O'pain Software Foundation: (3) relationship to GNU & openness]] Many of you are probably wondering about whether the new "Open Software Foundation" has, or could have, anything to do with GNU. Sad to say, the answer is no: they have no interest in free software (we have asked). Their list of investors is unusual, but they are just another software company in other respects (such as distribution terms). They will not have any direct effect on the GNU project. I'm not sure whether to regard their choice of name as flattery, or as an attempt to attract to themselves the good will we have earned, without doing what we do to deserve it. Either way, it is an amusing way for a giant to treat a dwarf. I'm forwarding a part of a message which describes the situation more amusingly than I was going to do it. From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: O'pain Software Foundation: (3) relationship to GNU & openness Date: 23 May 88 03:40:06 GMT Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco I see too much resemblance between "Open Software Foundation" and "Free Software Foundation". Given its constituency, the only thing I expect to be "open" about it is its mouth. While Apollo might have learned how to survive in an open systems market (I'm keeping an open mind about that :-), IBM and DEC hate it like poison. The name is just a marketing gimmick, like the "Citizens for Decency, Justice, and the American Way" type political committees. If the Free Software Foundation feels that its name has been unfairly infringed upon, I would be glad to back it in a lawsuit, and I suspect that other GNU users would rally to its support. [My opinion is that, although they are guilty, the best way to deal with them is to ignore them and spend our time developing GNU. - rms] OSF could have chosen to take an approach like GNU, but deliberately spurned it. I personally put some of the Hamilton Group people in touch with the GNU leadership, as did Rich $alz. While I could believe that a bunch of lawyer-bound companies might not want Richard Stallman in charge of their new Unix-clone project (though his track record so far is amazingly good), they could have chosen to write their code under the same terms (anyone can distribute sources for any price, but with no restrictions on redistribution; distributing binaries at any price requires you to distribute matching sources at copying cost for 3 years). GNU has written some large parts of Unix and more are under way; OSF could have contributed much of the remaining work and come up with a complete, modern, working, non-AT&T, public source code clone of Unix. The fact that they didn't speaks volumes to me about their motives. They want to keep this software under corporate control. They will be "open" with each other, not with their customers... [Speculations, and opinions of AT&T and Sun that I don't share, omitted. - rms] ------- End of Forwarded Message