hallvard@TELLUS.UNIK.NO (08/17/89)
The discussions of copyleft & bison/libg++... have mostly concerned people writing not-copylefted programs which use GNU programs. If I have not skipped too much of gnu.misc.discuss, this part of the story has been forgotten: When the GNU system is complete, we will no longer need to buy unix programs, and the world is perfect :-) But there will always be lots of marvelous programs which are not copylefted, and lots of GNU users who want to run them. For many such programs, some GNU tools needed to install/run them may only be used with copylefted programs. Let's say a program uses some "standard" classes from the C++ library. A user who wants this program, may: 1) Never have head of copyleft, and happily install the program. 2) Install the program, expecting not to be discovered and sued. 3) Decide not to install the program anyway. 4) Buy a C++ compiler (or install a public domain compiler, without support and possibly insufficiently tested). To install it, he may need to buy yacc as well, if bison can only be used with copylefted programs. ** If there is copyleft on many programs which usually are not ** copyrighted, there may be several (and longer) such chains of ** programs (like g++ -> bison) which must be replaced by ** not-copylefted versions to install a single not-copylefted ** program. 5) Write a not-copylefted version of libg++. So, several public domain versions of libg++ will appear, and the copyleft on libg++ will no longer be of any use. 6) Write a copylefted version of the program. Remember: This applies even to programs which are already free! I thought the idea of GNU was free software, and freeing programmers from having to reinvent the wheel...? Have I missed something?