benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies) (06/07/89)
I find myself in the odd position of disagreeing with the FSF fundamental philosophy, yet agreeing absolutely with their right to hold it and advance it via distribution restrictions on their code. People who find the FSF "hypocritical" or otherwise unsavory are entirely capable of building a competitive set of public domain or less restrictively distributed copyrighted tools. For example, owners could force redistribution of code and its direct derivatives, but permit its inclusion in larger non-source-distributed items. If the existing marketplace wasn't so much peddling cruft, the FSF might never have come into existence. Blame the authors, porters, and resellers of the biggest piece of cruft extant. After all, it was the OS project that initially sparked FSF. I would like to clarify the reason for my two recent postings. As the FSF/LPF has been pointing out long and loud, the current state of copyright law appears to allow (or possibly allow) a copyright holder to exercise rather outrageous restrictions. As a copyright holder, the FSF can do this. The perception of this risk, however unjustified, is a problem. Negotiating with the FSF's lawyers isn't always a solution. People don't want to make themselves conspicuous. After all, once an FSF code base has been at your site, your employees may have read it and more-or-less purposefully translated it into code you think you own. (Note that copyright on a literary work protects translating it to another language -- no one is sure where the boundary is between patent protection of "algorithms" and copyright protection of particular programs. This is why people talk in terms ordinarily reserved for trade secret. If I have a piece of GNU code in one GNU emacs window, and type something new in another window, I may well be engaged in copyright violation. (An interesting side-question is how we know that no existing FSF code from non-R. Stallman contributors wasn't created in this very way.)) So, since the FSF abhors certain uses of the ambiguity of the copyright law to attempt to corner the market, it might want to practice what it preaches, and disclaim some possible rights. Like look and feel. I won't claim to know what boundary the FSF might want to draw. One might imagine a statement specifying FSF's claim with respect to translation. Currently, the FSF takes the position that linking in FSF code with ld invokes GPL, but invoking it via fork/exec or RPC or whatever does not. That position could be in writing in the GPL. Of course, FSF could just take the position that if you are building only GPL distributed code, none of this should bother you, so why should they bother? I would feel frustrated, but its their right. After all, its a *free* country. -- Benson I. Margulies