Whats GNU with you?

[Rick Spanbauer]

	Sorry, Lauren, I for one agree with most of RMS's stated 
	principals.  The commercialization of Unix is sure to cause
	only trouble for those of us in the research community; I fully
	expect that at some point in the future Unix sources will be
	made unavailable to universities.  The excuse will read something
	like ".. We consider this material proprietary ....".

	My personal feeling is that the commonly accepted principal
	of free flow of scientific knowledge should apply in the
	case of programs.  We will all benefit in the long run if
	projects can be accomplished by rewriting, modifying, or
	cannablizing existing code (ie - a software equivalent to
	the hardware hackers junkbox).  For example, it is considerably
	easier to modify an existing compiler to produce code for a new
	target machine than it is to rewrite a new compiler.

	I suggest that if businesspersons will always choose to pay for a
	fully supported product, there is no loss of revenue in giving
	software away free (well, at a nominal copying charge) to 
	programmers who request it, and letting some private company sell it 
	to businesses.  The terms of the programmers license agreement 
	might be: no support, and that the product cannot be resold for 
	commercial gains.  This way, we can continue our research, I can 
	hack in peace on my home Unix machine, programmers can eat, and 
	businesspersons can pay their $$ and have their hands held and 
	questions answered.  

	Your point of stabilizing programs so that unsophisticated
	users may rely on them is well taken, but not to the extreme
	that I cannot "do my own thing".  Is it your view (to quote
	a line from TWOK) "The needs of the many outweigh the needs
	of the few" ??

	Another motivation for obtaining sources (aside from adding
	value to existing systems) is that many, many products are
	released today without being fully debugged.  The best response 
	time from bug report to bug fix that I have grown to expect is
	roughly 2 months.  While I am waiting for the company to fix
	their $$%%&?! software, it costs me more time and effort to
	work around the bug than it would to fix it!

	If you feel these fears are irrational, I can relate the problems
	I have had in (unsuccessfully) getting a prominent west coast
	workstation manufacturer to release their sources.  Or about the
	semiconductor manufacturer who insisted that I pay $50K for
	their UNIX port (they have since reduced the university price
	to $1000 - fortunately there are some enlightened companies).
	Or about the company who sold us a $10000 Pascal compiler that
	we literally found 1 code generation bug/week over the course
	of several months; they often took 3 months to repair the simplest 
	problem.  Etc, etc, etc.

	Convinced that copyrights, trademarks, patents, regulations
	and so called "proprietary information" will be our ultimate 
	undoing,

						Rick Spanbauer
						SUNY/Stony Brook