From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Copyleft vs Public Domain
Date: 12 Jan 93 03:34:24 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1993Jan11.223425.19206
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal

In article <1993Jan11.205207.17773@uvm.edu> 
wollman@aix2.emba.uvm.edu (Garrett Wollman) writes:

>In article <1993Jan11.032430.19184@husc3.harvard.edu>
>zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes:

GW:
>(I think it's about time for Zeleny to join Farwell in my KILL file...)

Would you like detailed instructions, or are you capable of
accomplishing this feat on your own?

MZ:
>>Huh? in what sense is the PD source not readily available?

GW:
>1.  I create a PD program and pass it around to a few people (set A).
>2.  One of these people (B) creates a binary from my source and gives
>    it to another group of people (set C).
>
>A is the set of people who have access to the source.  C is the set of
>people who have access to the binary.  B = A\cap B = the set of people
>who have the binary and the source.  The people in C - B don't have
>access to the source, unless B chooses to give it to them.

And Oxford University Press charges a lot of money for electronic
versions of classic texts, which can be readily obtained by ftp, or,
for that matter, legally copied from someone gullible enough to have
paid for them.  If your program is in the public domain, the people
who do not have the source are free to copy it from anyone else.  No
one can legally appropriate public domain texts.

MZ:
>>I shan't presume to speak for you or your programs, but for anyone
>>*but* a skilled programmer, Emacs is *far* inferior to any generic
>>(WYSIWYG, graphical) word processor.

GW:
>Tell that to the graduate students and technical secretaries who use
>it daily at this any many other locations around the world.

Let me get this straight: are you seriously suggesting that the extra
power and complexity of Emacs is a boon to anyone who is only
interested in cutting and pasting, and so on?  Do you also expect BSD
UNIX to do better among computer novices, than Macintosh?

>>[. . .]

MZ:
>>The difference is, no single, dedicated agency has ever tried to
>>maintain and develop the PD extensions of X, TeX, or BSD.

GW:
>Wrong.  In particular, MIT, Stanford and the University of Washington,
>and UC Berkeley, respectively.

The key word in the above is "dedicated".

MZ:
>>What I have in mind may be imagined as a planned and
>>coordinated counterpart to piecemeal PD software development currently
>>undertaken by the US government and universities.

GW:
>If the US government plans to develop *any* significant piece of
>software, then they make sure that it was actually developed by
>someone who can claim copyright in the work, so that they can then
>turn around and charge lots of money for it.

This sort of claim is conventionally directed to alt.conspiracy.

>-GAWollman
>
>-- 
>Garrett A. Wollman   | Shashish is simple, it's discreet, it's brief. ... 
>wollman@emba.uvm.edu | Shashish is the bonding of hearts in spite of distance.
>uvm-gen!wollman      | It is a bond more powerful than absence.  We like people
>UVM disagrees.       | who like Shashish.  - Claude McKenzie + Florent Vollant

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."
Xref: sparky gnu.misc.discuss:4354 talk.philosophy.misc:3248 misc.legal:22296