rick@sbcs.UUCP (Rick Spanbauer) (10/05/83)
Sorry, Lauren, I for one agree with most of RMS's stated principals. The commercialization of Unix is sure to cause only trouble for those of us in the research community; I fully expect that at some point in the future Unix sources will be made unavailable to universities. The excuse will read something like ".. We consider this material proprietary ....". My personal feeling is that the commonly accepted principal of free flow of scientific knowledge should apply in the case of programs. We will all benefit in the long run if projects can be accomplished by rewriting, modifying, or cannablizing existing code (ie - a software equivalent to the hardware hackers junkbox). For example, it is considerably easier to modify an existing compiler to produce code for a new target machine than it is to rewrite a new compiler. I suggest that if businesspersons will always choose to pay for a fully supported product, there is no loss of revenue in giving software away free (well, at a nominal copying charge) to programmers who request it, and letting some private company sell it to businesses. The terms of the programmers license agreement might be: no support, and that the product cannot be resold for commercial gains. This way, we can continue our research, I can hack in peace on my home Unix machine, programmers can eat, and businesspersons can pay their $$ and have their hands held and questions answered. Your point of stabilizing programs so that unsophisticated users may rely on them is well taken, but not to the extreme that I cannot "do my own thing". Is it your view (to quote a line from TWOK) "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" ?? Another motivation for obtaining sources (aside from adding value to existing systems) is that many, many products are released today without being fully debugged. The best response time from bug report to bug fix that I have grown to expect is roughly 2 months. While I am waiting for the company to fix their $$%%&?! software, it costs me more time and effort to work around the bug than it would to fix it! If you feel these fears are irrational, I can relate the problems I have had in (unsuccessfully) getting a prominent west coast workstation manufacturer to release their sources. Or about the semiconductor manufacturer who insisted that I pay $50K for their UNIX port (they have since reduced the university price to $1000 - fortunately there are some enlightened companies). Or about the company who sold us a $10000 Pascal compiler that we literally found 1 code generation bug/week over the course of several months; they often took 3 months to repair the simplest problem. Etc, etc, etc. Convinced that copyrights, trademarks, patents, regulations and so called "proprietary information" will be our ultimate undoing, Rick Spanbauer SUNY/Stony Brook
hart@cp1.UUCP (10/12/83)
i guess capitalism has finally become a dirty word. there is no free lunch! someone has to pay the programmer's salary and it doesn't matter whether it is the good old federal government, local state government with a federal subsidity or some enterprising stiff with his life savings on the line. i would hate to think we are heading for the day when the software pipeline dries up. there is still a place for commercialism in our society. if an author wish to place his work in the public domain, thats great! but many have bills to pay and children to care for therefore employers are **very** important. ask the steel workers who have been out of work for years. "i know this is the wrong place for this dialog but i just had to drop my simplistic views in the hopper"