ksh 11/16/88e now available in AT&T Toolchest

[Jay Maynard]

In article <1990Oct2.180301.10897 at cs.utk.edu> Dave Sill <de5 at ornl.gov> writes:
>In article <4140 at lib.tmc.edu>, jmaynard at thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu (Jay Maynard) writes:
>>OK...so it's not OK to blatantly advertise commercial products, but it's OK to
>>blatantly advertise the soi-disant Free Software Foundation's products. I get
>>it now.
>That's right.  In the former case, a comercial entity gains advantage
>at the expense of the USENET community.  In the latter, everyone
>benefits and no profits are made at the expense of others.

*Everyone* benefits? I doubt it. Only those that have bought into the GNU
utopia benefit. The rest of us who do not wish to join Stallman's crusade pay
to shuffle around more bits. No monetary profits may be made, but that's not
all there is to it.
There have been messages already posted about how people have benefited by the
ksh88e announcement.
There is no difference in substance between the two cases. The audience for
the FSF announcement is NOT everyone, nor is it even all of the Usenet
community.

>>GNU stuff is *not* free. It costs something other than money, though: it costs
>>your freedom to do as you like with your code if you include even a line of
>>their code. $150 sure sounds cheap by comparison.
>Yes, their are restrictions on what you can do with *their*
>code--you're free to do whatever you want with your own code--but
>isn't that only fair?  And there is absolutely no reason why one would
>need to include a modified bash in their product, so the fear of it
>causing you to give your precious code away is baseless.

Your statement is only true if you also hold to the belief that placing their
code in your code automatically turns your code into their code. There's only
one word that correctly describes that scenario: theft. The FSF has stolen your
code, and turned it into their code, all by a couple of innocuous-sounding
lines in the GNU Public Virus...er...License.

Don't believe that? Then you must believe instead that the GPV tells you what
you can do with *your* code. The results are analogous.

I will have no GPV-licensed code on my computer, so as to remove any and all
doubt about whether or not my code contains any GPV-licensed code.

-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jmaynard at thesis1.hsch.utexas.edu  | adequately be explained by stupidity.
"It's a hardware bug!" "It's a    +---------------------------------------
software bug!" "It's two...two...two bugs in one!" - _Engineer's Rap_