childers@avsd.UUCP (Richard Childers) (10/18/89)
The title says it all ... basically, I'm looking for places where I can get
both a complete listing of what's currently available / offered, and places
where I can actually get the results, through whatever transactions are
needed to make it a reality.
Options include filling out POs and ordering tapes, UUCP, and anonymous FTP.
I'd assume that the first option would be the best option, as it would give
our organization an unmodified set of files and documents, while giving FSF
some badly needed funding.
-=*=-
The discussion regarding (a) the politics of Richard Stallman, and (b) the
politics of contributing to or using FSF-derived software have been most
interesting and educational. Please keep the exchange flowing.
Insofar as my personal opionion on the matter is concerned, I can understand
Richard Stallman's distress with the intensely proprietary nature of what
could instead be a mutually supporting, socialist society of intellectual
peers of the realm, where the best solution was always chosen objectively by
consensus and implemented without coercion or threats of suits related to
use of proprietary algorithms. But until the problem of the society in which
context his efforts must be judged is solved, I don't think there will be any
solution of the type he envisions.
I have also thought about this, and the best solution seems to be to copyright
everything under your own name, and _then_ place it in the public domain.
This is what Buckminster Fuller did, after one of his early inventions ( pre-
stressed concrete ) was ripped off by an unscrupulous coworker. Since then,
he has without fail done two things :
(1) copyright / patent his work, under his name, legally, and
(2) _then_ make it available for the public domain.
This allows everyone to use, for example, the geodesic architectural
principles for their own use, without allowing _anyone_ except Bucky
( who chose not to ) to profit from their use. If your desire not to
profit from your works is genuine, this is a genuine solution to the
twin problems of copyrights and freedom of information. Not redefinition
of "copyright", but judicious use of it in combination with other legal
machanisms, as one small step towards trust and sharing of resources, in
hopes that some day the world _will_ become a less competitive place.
For instance. I may write some UNIX lookalikes for the MS-DOS world. I'm
not heavily inclined towards selling them, they are trivial, it seems
like robbery, and besides I would rather have peer respect than big bucks.
( No taxes. ) Maybe I'll port them to a few other environments. Maybe
someone else will port them further. I don't want BigCo to download them
and claim them as their own, so I'll have to copyright them as mine ...
but I will clearly state that I only intend to enforce the copyright against
mass duplication, and in fact may word it similarly to copyright notices
that allow people to xerox pages of books for review purposes, as it's not
the _fact_ that they've copied it, so much as their subsequent _intent_,
that I wish to outlaw. This settles my desire for freely available software,
while countering BigCo's desire to avoid compensating me. If they want to
negotiate a right-to-copy license, they can. ( Perhaps a 10% of reward, if
any, clause, for witnesses might help this. :-)
I have a lot of faith, incidentally, in the competitive tendency of people
to exist even after money has been eliminated as a source of competition.
Thus, I think that an intellectually driven society of software engineers
isn't all that impractical, after all, especially in light of the fact that
just about every job that exists will be automated within a hundred years,
and we'll have to turn to heights of intellectual achievement to alleviate
boredom, in any case.
So forget public domain as a serious concept, and think about, not shareware,
where the "share" means money, but shareware, where "share" means that we
all stand to benefit from making our favorite tools widely available for free.
While still retaining copyright, and looking towards cooperatively funded
ways to legally enforce violations of cooperatively driven environments, such
as GNU. Maybe RMS doesn't have the entire solution, but he's right - there is
a problem, and it extends beyond the immediate world of software, it's a
societal problem that will increase in the years to come, and will impact us
all if we don't take steps to counter it _now_.
-- richard
--
* A CITIZEN: "Who might you be ? Samson ? --" *
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* from _Cyrano de Bergerac_, by Edmond Rostand *
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