Re: GPL, BSD and the FSF

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Mark Tarver

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Jan 10, 2015, 4:07:30 PM1/10/15
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I wanted to give the issue of use of the GPL and the BSD to a separate thread because there is a lot of confusion about the issues here. The whole debate has been fogged by misinformation provided by the FSF concerning copyright.  Quite of lot of programmers in the open source movement believe that because BSD is a liberal 'do as thou wilt' license; it is OK to 'relicense' BSD code under GPL.  This is a myth.  Feel free to copy this post to news groups.

The whole BSD/GPL issue came up in 2007 in the OpenBSD group where an OS programmer Reyk created a program under BSD that the GPL Linux folks wanted to place under GPL.  You can read De Raadt's account here.


The story Theo gave, and I believe him, is that GPL Linux people pestered Reyk to allow them to license the code under GPL which he would not.  According to Theo, they then simply took it and removed his name and put their names on top and GPLed it.  This is of course illegal.  When caught out, they resorted to a series of subterfuges including an argument that any BSD program could be 'relicensed' by having the GPL placed on it. According to de Raadt, Stallman disclaimed all knowledge of the episode.   ("The FSF is not involved in this dispute."). However it seems Eben Moglen had knowledge of what was going on, and since Moglen is the right hand of Stallman, it is hard to credit Stallman not knowing the existence of the dispute. Here you will find him actively defending the Linux/GPL position with a view of copyright that is quite wrong.  


This is a very long thread (> 900 messages and I read them all) so type license into the search box if you want to read what Stallman says.   His posts are masterpieces of prevarication and obfuscation.

De Raadt fought his corner and good for him;  the GPL people backed down under threat of legal action.  Theo says; and he is worth quoting because he is right.

But that is the clincher -- by law, a new person doing small changes to an original work is not allowed to assert copyright, and hence, gains none of the rights given by copyright law, and hence, cannot assert a license (copyright licenses surrender a subset of the
author's rights which the law gives them; the licenses do not not assert rights out of thin air).

Of course a decent organisation would have never tried such a disrespectful trick on an OS project. Unfortunately this relicensing idea has spread to the news groups.

Now it is open to me as copyright holder, to dual license the kernel to GPL, but I will not do so until there are some fundamental root and branch reforms of the FSF.  Like what you ask?  Well, here they are.

1.  The whole 'closed source is evil' meme needs to be dropped.  Programmers are entitled to do with their own work as they want, and it is obnoxious to call somebody a 'thief' as Stallman did to Bryan Lunduke (see 55m and after), merely for writing closed source games to feed his family.  The arguments Stallman uses to support his position are lamentably weak.  It is doubly obnoxious and hypocritical to do so because the FSF has been in receipt of donations from companies that make money from closed source.  

2.  Many of the programmers contributing to GPL are doing the work pro bono for little or nothing.  Yet a vast income in the legal arm (SFLC) of the FSF  is being trousered by lawyers.   Moglen is making a huge sum in addition to his income as a law professor at Columbia. The lawyers need to work under the same conditions that programmers do.

3.  Creative rights do need to be respected.  Stallman's advocacy of piracy under 'the right to read' is just an endorsement of a criminal offence; particularly if the author is relying on book revenue to get by.   

I would also add, not as a requirement, but as a wish, that the Orwellian use of the word 'free' to describe the GPL should be dropped.  

This does not affect the ability to write GPL programs on top of Shen, but no part of my code will be relicensed to GPL until these reforms are instituted.


Mark

h...@ancell-ent.com

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Jan 10, 2015, 5:00:35 PM1/10/15
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It looks much worse if you examine the 2012 US IRS Form 990 filings for both organizations using a site like http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder/  Each organization has roughly the same income and expenses, around 1.2 million US$, and Moglen is earning more than 1/2 of the 2007 figure Mark linked to.
 
Let me mention the most recent bit of FSF/RMS unpleasantness, which is very much apropos to Shen because it pertains to RMS's successful efforts to keep GCC unmodular, so one conceptual part can't be easily connected to something doubleplusungood.  If you are unfortunate enough to be programming in C++, major refactoring efforts---desirable as C++ add various sane things---need access to a compiler's parse tree, since you certainly are not going to be writing your own (I'm told it's a very ugly language to parse).  This is causing great problems for EMACS, it's being left in the dirt by IDEs that properly support this.  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8861360 for more details.
 
In general I see this as an issue of software quality and the very much related popularity in the field/size of the community, which are much more important to me that RMS's vision of "freedom".  The FSF way, as demonstrated most especially by projects like Gnu EMACS and the GCC that are under the direct control of RMS, subordinates both to its vision of freedom, and this is rapidly proving to be very consequential to GCC.  LLVM is where all the action is nowadays, even if it only supports a handfull of backends....
 
- Harold
 
----- Original message -----
From: Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 12:48:52 -0800 (PST)
 
Sorry;  the income I recorded is the SFLC - which is the legal arm of the FSF - however my point still stands - the income being made here is feeding lawyers and needs to be diverted to the programmers.
 
Mark


On Saturday, 10 January 2015 20:29:10 UTC, Mark Tarver wrote:
I wanted to give the issue of use of the GPL and the BSD to a separate thread because there is a lot of confusion about the issues here. The whole debate has been fogged by misinformation provided by the FSF concerning copyright.  Quite of lot of programmers in the open source movement believe that because BSD is a liberal 'do as thou wilt' license; it is OK to 'relicense' BSD code under GPL.  This is a myth.  Feel free to copy this post to news groups.
 
The whole BSD/GPL issue came up in 2007 in the OpenBSD group where an OS programmer Reyk created a program under BSD that the GPL Linux folks wanted to place under GPL.  You can read De Raadt's account here.
 
 
The story Theo gave, and I believe him, is that GPL Linux people pestered Reyk to allow them to license the code under GPL which he would not.  According to Theo, they then simply took it and removed his name and put their names on top and GPLed it.  This is of course illegal.  When caught out, they resorted to a series of subterfuges including an argument that any BSD program could be 'relicensed' by having the GPL placed on it. According to de Raadt, Stallman disclaimed all knowledge of the episode.   ("The FSF is not involved in this dispute."). However it seems Eben Moglen had knowledge of what was going on, and since Moglen is the right hand of Stallman, it is hard to credit Stallman not knowing the existence of the dispute. Here you will find him actively defending the Linux/GPL position with a view of copyright that is quite wrong.  
 
 
This is a very long thread (> 900 messages and I read them all) so type license into the search box if you want to read what Stallman says.   His posts are masterpieces of prevarication and obfuscation.
 
De Raadt fought his corner and good for him;  the GPL people backed down under threat of legal action.  Theo says; and he is worth quoting because he is right.
 
But that is the clincher -- by law, a new person doing small changes to an original work is not allowed to assert copyright, and hence, gains none of the rights given by copyright law, and hence, cannot assert a license (copyright licenses surrender a subset of the
author's rights which the law gives them; the licenses do not not assert rights out of thin air).
 
Of course a decent organisation would have never tried such a disrespectful trick on an OS project. Unfortunately this relicensing idea has spread to the news groups.
 
Now it is open to me as copyright holder, to dual license the kernel to GPL, but I will not do so until there are some fundamental root and branch reforms of the FSF.  Like what you ask?  Well, here they are.
 
1.  The whole 'closed source is evil' meme needs to be dropped.  Programmers are entitled to do with their own work as they want, and it is obnoxious to call somebody a 'thief' as Stallman did to Bryan Lunduke (see 55m and after), merely for writing closed source games to feed his family.  The arguments Stallman uses to support his position are lamentably weak.  It is doubly obnoxious and hypocritical to do so because the FSF has been in receipt of donations from companies that make money from closed source.  
 
2.  Many of the programmers contributing to GPL are doing the work pro bono for little or nothing.  Yet a vast share of the FSF income is being trousered by lawyers.   Moglen is making a huge sum in addition to his income as a law professor at Columbia. The lawyers need to work under the same conditions that programmers do.
 
3.  Creative rights do need to be respected.  Stallman's advocacy of piracy under 'the right to read' is just an endorsement of a criminal offence; particularly if the author is relying on book revenue to get by.   
 
I would also add, not as a requirement, but as a wish, that the Orwellian use of the word 'free' to describe the GPL should be dropped.  
 
This does not affect the ability to write GPL programs on top of Shen, but no part of my code will be relicensed to GPL until these reforms are instituted.
 
 
Mark

 

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Mark Tarver

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Jan 10, 2015, 5:39:33 PM1/10/15
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Yes;  a lot of money is being made here.  What I do not like is that Reyk was approached (in fact pestered) to hand over his work to the FSF/SFLC for free  - note no question of $ being handed over - whereas Moglen is making huge bucks for everything he does.   
The misuse of power here is quite striking and the GPL has become a sort of Trojan horse for something quite unpleasant.   

The thing is that the more the FSF does these things, the more open source programmers will pull away from the FSF and the more the FSF will be dependent on predatory tricks to get the code they want.  Eventually the whole organisation will be hollowed out.  I cannot see the FSF reforming, but I am determined we will not be treated like the OpenBSD project.  I would really like to make the Shen website a GPL-free BSD zone.

Mark

Michael Bradley, Jr.

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Jan 10, 2015, 9:07:23 PM1/10/15
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Mark, thank you for sharing the links to the controversy that took place in 2007.  I was unaware of it previously (or had forgotten about it), and it does help to put things into perspective.

There is a long write-up on the SFLC's website from that same time period. It doesn't address the controversy head on, but does seem to have been written in reaction to it:


    Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers

    https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html


I wouldn't describe it as fun reading, but I did read it completely, and the suggestions therein seem reasonable to me. If anyone knows of a critical piece or law case which invalidates various assertions and conclusions in that document, I would be grateful for references.

Let me say that I am no fan of the GPL and certainly not an advocate for it. I personally don't use it for my own projects (except as obligated), preferring permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2). When copyleft seems called for, I tend to reach for the Eclipse Public License (EPL), which has softer terms regarding reciprocal licensing obligations. Going beyond the GPL to the ideals, even extremism, of RMS and crew -- I share many of your concerns and objections. So, all in all, please don't mistake me for a GPL advocate.

Regarding the points I raised in the other thread:  I may not have been entirely clear, but I meant to refer solely to derivative, copyrightable works based on the Shen sources.  I agree that no one has the legal right to relicense a work simply because the original author adopted a permissive license like BSD.  The question then is to what extent the BSD license propagates itself with respect to derivative works? And by that I don't mean works written in the Shen Language and/or compiled with programs you wrote.  I mean specifically the case where someone takes the body of work which is the "basis" of a Shen port (e.g. your soon to be released Shen 17 sources and Shen->KL program), changes those sources, and creates a derived set of sources and compiled programs. Perhaps there are aspects of KL they wish to change... who knows. The point is that it is possible (in practice, not with respect to legal concerns) to create a derivative work of this kind, and the question is then raised as to the derivative's author's obligation to adopt the same BSD license. For the sake of argument, let's ignore the case of trivial changes and assume we're talking about derivative works which are substantially modified from the originals.

Everything I've read (not just today) leads me to conclude that while the derivative's author is required by law to retain/reproduce the original's license text (and in effect point back to the original work), he is not bound by law to license his derivative -- used privately or distributed to the four winds -- under the same BSD license. He could choose any license which is compatible with BSD, so long as he does not neglect to include the original license text (as spelled out in clauses #1 and #2 of 3-Clause BSD).  There appears to be no case law, in this country at least, which actually requires the derivative's author to keep the original license intact on a file-by-file basis. As the SFLC points out, maintaining licenses file-by-file is a common practice (and for good reasons), but I have yet to find any examples where a judge or jury or expert legal analyst has said that it's strictly required. The alternative being to collect the original's license notice/s into another file/s which is part of the derivative work.

So if you want to create a GPL-free zone, it seems to me that the only choice is to put an extra stipulation in your license or license notice. The Google Polymer Project (a software framework for Web developers) seems to have gone that direction:

  https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt

"This code may only be used under the BSD style license found at http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt"

The actual text of Polymer's license is boilerplate 3-Clause BSD:

  http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt

It's not entirely clear to me to what extent Google's notice actually (legally) restricts derivative or combined works from being licensed differently, but it does seem clear that they want to give the impression of a restriction.

For what it's worth, I would suggest not changing the text of the 3-Clause BSD license for Shen. That would only reintroduce the problems associated with having a non-standard license. So in distributions of Shen, the LICENSE.txt file, or whatever it's named, and comment blocks with the heading "License" (or whatever) would have only the standard license text, with your name in the appropriate places. But in proximity to the license, you could give notice of a generic restriction similar to the one used by Google for Polymer.

Personally, I don't like the idea. It feels like we end up back in the realm of copyleft – to avoid downstream GPL'ing there is put in place a restriction that has a lot in common with the GPL. Almost instantly, the spectre is raised of needing to hire a lawyer to figure out whether incorporation of "BSD only" source code will infect combined and derivative works to an unacceptable extent. For me, the point of permissive licenses is to say something like: "I wish people to know about, have access to, and make use of my open source code under the licensing terms I adopted for my work. You must give me credit always and indicate my licensing terms when you incorporate my work into yours, whether you choose to license your own work under the same or other terms. If you incorporate my work or parts of it as such, without creating a derivative work, then those portions of the combined work are understood to be, and must be indicated to be, licensed under the terms I originally chose. In this way, others will have the opportunity to know about, build on, and benefit from my work, as you did."  And that's it.

Best regards,

--
Michael Bradley
@michaelsbradley

Mark Tarver

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Jan 11, 2015, 8:32:35 AM1/11/15
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Mark, thank you for sharing the links to the controversy that took place in 2007.  I was unaware of it previously (or had forgotten about it), and it does help to put things into perspective.

There is a long write-up on the SFLC's website from that same time period. It doesn't address the controversy head on, but does seem to have been written in reaction to it:


    Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers

    https://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2007/gpl-non-gpl-collaboration.html


I wouldn't describe it as fun reading, but I did read it completely, and the suggestions therein seem reasonable to me. If anyone knows of a critical piece or law case which invalidates various assertions and conclusions in that document, I would be grateful for references.

Let me say that I am no fan of the GPL and certainly not an advocate for it. I personally don't use it for my own projects (except as obligated), preferring permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2). When copyleft seems called for, I tend to reach for the Eclipse Public License (EPL), which has softer terms regarding reciprocal licensing obligations. Going beyond the GPL to the ideals, even extremism, of RMS and crew -- I share many of your concerns and objections. So, all in all, please don't mistake me for a GPL advocate.

Regarding the points I raised in the other thread:  I may not have been entirely clear, but I meant to refer solely to derivative, copyrightable works based on the Shen sources.  I agree that no one has the legal right to relicense a work simply because the original author adopted a permissive license like BSD.  The question then is to what extent the BSD license propagates itself with respect to derivative works? And by that I don't mean works written in the Shen Language and/or compiled with programs you wrote.  I mean specifically the case where someone takes the body of work which is the "basis" of a Shen port (e.g. your soon to be released Shen 17 sources and Shen->KL program), changes those sources, and creates a derived set of sources and compiled programs. Perhaps there are aspects of KL they wish to change... who knows. The point is that it is possible (in practice, not with respect to legal concerns) to create a derivative work of this kind, and the question is then raised as to the derivative's author's obligation to adopt the same BSD license. For the sake of argument, let's ignore the case of trivial changes and assume we're talking about derivative works which are substantially modified from the originals.

Everything I've read (not just today) leads me to conclude that while the derivative's author is required by law to retain/reproduce the original's license text (and in effect point back to the original work), he is not bound by law to license his derivative -- used privately or distributed to the four winds -- under the same BSD license. He could choose any license which is compatible with BSD, so long as he does not neglect to include the original license text (as spelled out in clauses #1 and #2 of 3-Clause BSD).  There appears to be no case law, in this country at least, which actually requires the derivative's author to keep the original license intact on a file-by-file basis. As the SFLC points out, maintaining licenses file-by-file is a common practice (and for good reasons), but I have yet to find any examples where a judge or jury or expert legal analyst has said that it's strictly required. The alternative being to collect the original's license notice/s into another file/s which is part of the derivative work.

So if you want to create a GPL-free zone, it seems to me that the only choice is to put an extra stipulation in your license or license notice. The Google Polymer Project (a software framework for Web developers) seems to have gone that direction:

  https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/blob/master/banner.txt

"This code may only be used under the BSD style license found at http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt"

The actual text of Polymer's license is boilerplate 3-Clause BSD:

  http://polymer.github.io/LICENSE.txt

It's not entirely clear to me to what extent Google's notice actually (legally) restricts derivative or combined works from being licensed differently, but it does seem clear that they want to give the impression of a restriction.

For what it's worth, I would suggest not changing the text of the 3-Clause BSD license for Shen. That would only reintroduce the problems associated with having a non-standard license. So in distributions of Shen, the LICENSE.txt file, or whatever it's named, and comment blocks with the heading "License" (or whatever) would have only the standard license text, with your name in the appropriate places. But in proximity to the license, you could give notice of a generic restriction similar to the one used by Google for Polymer.

Personally, I don't like the idea. It feels like we end up back in the realm of copyleft – to avoid downstream GPL'ing there is put in place a restriction that has a lot in common with the GPL. Almost instantly, the spectre is raised of needing to hire a lawyer to figure out whether incorporation of "BSD only" source code will infect combined and derivative works to an unacceptable extent. For me, the point of permissive licenses is to say something like: "I wish people to know about, have access to, and make use of my open source code under the licensing terms I adopted for my work. You must give me credit always and indicate my licensing terms when you incorporate my work into yours, whether you choose to license your own work under the same or other terms. If you incorporate my work or parts of it as such, without creating a derivative work, then those portions of the combined work are understood to be, and must be indicated to be, licensed under the terms I originally chose. In this way, others will have the opportunity to know about, build on, and benefit from my work, as you did."  And that's it.

Best regards,

--
Michael Bradley
@michaelsbradley


The whole notion of licensing revolves around the concept of derivative - if it is derivative then it carries the same license.   There is no sense to licensing of any kind if the concept of derivative is abandoned.  And BSD carries within it, the idea that compiled (e.g. binary) files carry the BSD license.  Since licensing is invariant across compilation, the BSD license carries right through across all Shen platforms.

The idea of relicensing under a 'compatible license' is something that the FSF introduced, but it is a fiction unless you actually can assert copyright over the work you are licensing.  You cannot add extra conditions to a license without copyright and you get that by writing the work yourself or else by seeking permission from the author.  This is exactly what Theo was fighting for.   If you modify the code (as I do with the CL port to optimise performance) and put it in a seperate file then providing the changes are substantial - that code is yours.  However these changes do not allow you to claim copyright and hence license over the main body of the code.

In saying this I am not placing extra conditions on the 3 clause BSD license; I am simply pointing out what the license means, what copyright means and what the relations between the copyright and licensing are.  

Now as regards the GPL-free zone, as a matter of policy (not law, but policy) I'd prefer to keep GPL out of the Shen site, and particularly the library.  I'm not stopping people placing their stuff under GPL, but I am pointing out that GPL - used unwisely - can have repercussions that can lead to problems which we both might be drawn into.  I've also pointed out that the FSF is corrupt and unethical and that the OS movement needs to do something about it.  I think the OS movement, and we in particular, would be better keeping a distance from the FSF.

It's good we're having this discussion and it's worth OS programmers taking it in.

I'll look at the FSF stuff, but really if you read Stallman in the long thread I supplied you'll see exactly what I mean about corrupt.  I encourage Shenturians to read it - it is fascinating.

Again feel free to copy this thread.

Mark 

h...@ancell-ent.com

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Jan 11, 2015, 11:01:04 AM1/11/15
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Let this be my last unprompted contribution to our 2 Minute Hate of the FSF/GPL/RMS (but feel free to ask specific questions):
 
From: Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:32:35 -0800 (PST)
 
[...]
 
The idea of relicensing under a 'compatible license' is something that the FSF introduced, but it is a fiction unless you actually can assert copyright over the work you are licensing.  You cannot add extra conditions to a license without copyright and you get that by writing the work yourself or else by seeking permission from the author.  This is exactly what Theo was fighting for.   If you modify the code (as I do with the CL port to optimise performance) and put it in a seperate file then providing the changes are substantial - that code is yours....
 
My understanding of copyright law as it's done in the US, especially in the context of translations of foreign media into English, is that such a file would still be a derivative work.  You own your contributions, the original rights holder loses nothing.  If the latter wants to use your work, they need your permission, and similarly you can't legally distribute your work without the rights holders' permission.  BSD licensing makes this simple and mechanical, and I personally would never touch an in-file license notice, I'd only add my own as needed.
 
BTW, I strongly advise making the Shen site GPL free, or cleanly segregating any GPL material and allowing no non-permissive licensed code in the standard library.  For the same reason as changing the Shen license to BSD: the less someone has to think about legal issues before using any of the Shen ecosystem, the better for its adaption.  Any viral license deliberately and intentionally imposes additional conditions in an otherwise permissive license environment.
 
E.g. at best, use GPL for a complete stand-alone work like an editor.  But please, especially given the small size of the Shen community, permissively license anything that others might want to use, like code to interact with a GUI.
 
It's good we're having this discussion and it's worth OS programmers taking it in.
 
I'll look at the FSF stuff, but really if you read Stallman in the long thread I supplied you'll see exactly what I mean about corrupt.  I encourage Shenturians to read it - it is fascinating.
 
Let me interject why I can speak authoritatively about RMS and what became the FSF (and why, for entirely non-legal reasons, my favorite license is the "MIT" (X Consortium) license :-):
 
I showed up at MIT as a freshman when the wire wrapping of the backplane of (CADR) Lisp Machine #9 was be checked by another Lisp Machine.  Lisp Machines were obviously the hottest thing at the time (enough so that the director of the rival Lab for Computer Science was claiming them as a LCS project during tours he gave until the famous nameplate on top was generated to stop that), and after finances forced me into a sordid life of programming I eventually ended up at Lisp Machines Inc., the competitor of Symbolics, in the 1982-3 period.
 
Before then RMS was a member of my social group, and we were on OK terms.  At LMI we were allies, in that he was doing his best to implement the most important new features in the MIT/LMI fork of the code.  I was also one of the few people left willing to break bread with him; if you've read the end of Steven Levy's Hackers which not entirely inaccurately portrays RMS as the last hacker left at the MIT AI Lab, well, one of his beefs was just that, almost all his colleagues off at Symbolics and able to politely avoid him.
 
We both gave up on Lisp Machines at about the same time, summer of 1983, and were in fact roommates when he launched the GNU project (the FSF came a couple of years later).  That didn't last too long for obvious reasons, and in due course, starting in 1985, I worked for UniPress, a company that published UNIX™ software.  Back then the most important thing was to have access to one of every type of UNIX™ out there, and combined with that their general model is what is called "closed gate open source" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_community ), you got binaries and source, but you couldn't redistribute either.
 
This was true for there most important product at the time, an obscure bit of software called Gosling Emacs™, an editor with a byte code compiler that was written by none other than the obscure James Gosling of eventual Java/JVM fame.  About half of my professional work in the '80s was on various versions of EMACS, I got tapped to finish the MS-DOS port, and moved to New Jersey for a while where it was located.
 
RMS outright stole Gosling Emacs™ to start the GNU version of it; the owners of UniPress acknowledged this and asked him not to do it.  The were old hands in the field and knew nothing good would come from legal action, and that RMS's version would, at least for a while, increase the general market for EMACS, back in a time where it was hard to afford the hardware to run it (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a legit criticism through the mid-90s).  We were labeled "Software Hoarders" (and named our LaserWriter that :-), accused of burning down his apartment building (seriously, and it did happen, that was where we had been roommates, a not so nice part of Cambridge, MA, USA, the culprits were "a couple of kids" "playing" with matches and kerosine), etc. etc.
 
E.g. our publishing and serious work in improving and bug fixing an version of EMACS that we shipped with source code was a worse crime than stealing that same code (RMS claimed he had received an email from Gosling that gave him permission, but never was able to produce a copy of such a vital document, and Gosling denied it).  And I knew the low level C source at an intimate level, GNU Emacs was most definitely legally a derived work, it was most unwise to do this, for UniPress could have nailed him to the wall and severely damaged the GNU project in its cradle.  His stewardship of GNU/FSF software projects is really that bad (and there's lots, lots more about GNU Emacs going forward, e.g. look into the Lucid fork.  GCC also once forked, and the other GNU/FSF marque project, the infamous Hurd operation system, is 29 years in the making and pretty obviously never going make it).
 
Anyway, enough of that, I'll close with two bits of humor; first a Not Necessarily Safe For Your Sanity (but really not that bad) mock advertisement of "GNU, a new fragrance by RMS" http://i.imgur.com/88Jgz.jpg and a very funny XKCD cartoon: http://xkcd.com/225/ (note Eric S. Raymond is (in)famously a gun owner).
 
- Harold
 

Mark Tarver

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Jan 11, 2015, 12:39:56 PM1/11/15
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On Sunday, 11 January 2015 16:01:04 UTC, Harold Ancell wrote:
Let this be my last unprompted contribution to our 2 Minute Hate of the FSF/GPL/RMS (but feel free to ask specific questions):
 
From: Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:32:35 -0800 (PST)
 
[...]
 
The idea of relicensing under a 'compatible license' is something that the FSF introduced, but it is a fiction unless you actually can assert copyright over the work you are licensing.  You cannot add extra conditions to a license without copyright and you get that by writing the work yourself or else by seeking permission from the author.  This is exactly what Theo was fighting for.   If you modify the code (as I do with the CL port to optimise performance) and put it in a seperate file then providing the changes are substantial - that code is yours....
 
My understanding of copyright law as it's done in the US, especially in the context of translations of foreign media into English, is that such a file would still be a derivative work.  You own your contributions, the original rights holder loses nothing.  If the latter wants to use your work, they need your permission, and similarly you can't legally distribute your work without the rights holders' permission.  BSD licensing makes this simple and mechanical, and I personally would never touch an in-file license notice, I'd only add my own as needed.

That is pretty much how I understand it and as does Theo de Raadt.
 
 
BTW, I strongly advise making the Shen site GPL free, or cleanly segregating any GPL material and allowing no non-permissive licensed code in the standard library.  For the same reason as changing the Shen license to BSD: the less someone has to think about legal issues before using any of the Shen ecosystem, the better for its adaption.  Any viral license deliberately and intentionally imposes additional conditions in an otherwise permissive license environment.

I'd agree with that - certainly the library is at the moment GPL free - since everything there is mine or Willi's I'll talk with him on Monday about transitioning to 3-clause BSD which makes life simple.  I assume you are talking here of a policy decision, not a legal one.   

 
 
E.g. at best, use GPL for a complete stand-alone work like an editor.  But please, especially given the small size of the Shen community, permissively license anything that others might want to use, like code to interact with a GUI.

I personally will not touch GPL.  Some people GPL their work because they want to make sure that derived versions are always kept readable.  I think that most programmers are not interested in virally infecting programs which they have no copyright over.  For such people it might be better to have a BSD license with an extra condition that says all derived versions must be readable.  Whether such a thing exists I do not know.
   
 
It's good we're having this discussion and it's worth OS programmers taking it in.
 
I'll look at the FSF stuff, but really if you read Stallman in the long thread I supplied you'll see exactly what I mean about corrupt.  I encourage Shenturians to read it - it is fascinating.
 
Let me interject why I can speak authoritatively about RMS and what became the FSF (and why, for entirely non-legal reasons, my favorite license is the "MIT" (X Consortium) license :-):
 
I showed up at MIT as a freshman when the wire wrapping of the backplane of (CADR) Lisp Machine #9 was be checked by another Lisp Machine.  Lisp Machines were obviously the hottest thing at the time (enough so that the director of the rival Lab for Computer Science was claiming them as a LCS project during tours he gave until the famous nameplate on top was generated to stop that), and after finances forced me into a sordid life of programming I eventually ended up at Lisp Machines Inc., the competitor of Symbolics, in the 1982-3 period.
 
Before then RMS was a member of my social group, and we were on OK terms.  At LMI we were allies, in that he was doing his best to implement the most important new features in the MIT/LMI fork of the code.  I was also one of the few people left willing to break bread with him; if you've read the end of Steven Levy's Hackers which not entirely inaccurately portrays RMS as the last hacker left at the MIT AI Lab, well, one of his beefs was just that, almost all his colleagues off at Symbolics and able to politely avoid him.
 
We both gave up on Lisp Machines at about the same time, summer of 1983, and were in fact roommates when he launched the GNU project (the FSF came a couple of years later).  That didn't last too long for obvious reasons, and in due course, starting in 1985, I worked for UniPress, a company that published UNIX™ software.  Back then the most important thing was to have access to one of every type of UNIX™ out there, and combined with that their general model is what is called "closed gate open source" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_community ), you got binaries and source, but you couldn't redistribute either.
 
This was true for there most important product at the time, an obscure bit of software called Gosling Emacs™, an editor with a byte code compiler that was written by none other than the obscure James Gosling of eventual Java/JVM fame.  About half of my professional work in the '80s was on various versions of EMACS, I got tapped to finish the MS-DOS port, and moved to New Jersey for a while where it was located.
 
RMS outright stole Gosling Emacs™ to start the GNU version of it; the owners of UniPress acknowledged this and asked him not to do it.  The were old hands in the field and knew nothing good would come from legal action, and that RMS's version would, at least for a while, increase the general market for EMACS, back in a time where it was hard to afford the hardware to run it (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping was a legit criticism through the mid-90s).  We were labeled "Software Hoarders" (and named our LaserWriter that :-), accused of burning down his apartment building (seriously, and it did happen, that was where we had been roommates, a not so nice part of Cambridge, MA, USA, the culprits were "a couple of kids" "playing" with matches and kerosine), etc. etc.
 
E.g. our publishing and serious work in improving and bug fixing an version of EMACS that we shipped with source code was a worse crime than stealing that same code (RMS claimed he had received an email from Gosling that gave him permission, but never was able to produce a copy of such a vital document, and Gosling denied it).  And I knew the low level C source at an intimate level, GNU Emacs was most definitely legally a derived work, it was most unwise to do this, for UniPress could have nailed him to the wall and severely damaged the GNU project in its cradle.  His stewardship of GNU/FSF software projects is really that bad (and there's lots, lots more about GNU Emacs going forward, e.g. look into the Lucid fork.  GCC also once forked, and the other GNU/FSF marque project, the infamous Hurd operation system, is 29 years in the making and pretty obviously never going make it).
 
Anyway, enough of that, I'll close with two bits of humor; first a Not Necessarily Safe For Your Sanity (but really not that bad) mock advertisement of "GNU, a new fragrance by RMS" http://i.imgur.com/88Jgz.jpg and a very funny XKCD cartoon: http://xkcd.com/225/ (note Eric S. Raymond is (in)famously a gun owner).
 
- Harold

Yes; the perfume ad is funny.  Normally I shy from personality stuff, because it can be thought to be ad hominem, but here I think the personality and history stuff is relevant because the FSF have authorship of the GPL and it is long enough and complex enough to act as a Venus flytrap.   Moglen is making money from GPL 3 legal cases.  If the FSF were coming from  a good place, one could say OK.  But they are not.  

The stewardship of the FSF is pretty bad (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTAwMTY) but if they want to waste money, well that's their business.

Re Emacs, Dan Weinraub had a few words on RMS from the Symbolics side.


Mark

 
 

Mark Tarver

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Jan 11, 2015, 1:36:20 PM1/11/15
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Incidentally, if you want to read Stallman's incorrect views on BSD and GPL you can read it on the long thread I gave.  but because the thread is very long I'll quote you the relevant parts.  Somebody asks  (Stallman in red)

... please tell me how I can statically link a program that I write to a GPL'd lib and still retain my freedom to BSD license my code. 

Under the usual interpretation of the revised BSD license, this is straightforward.  You put the revised BSD license on your file, you 
package it with the source of the GPL-covered library, and you release it all.  The combination, as a whole, is under the GNU GPL, but anyone can use code from your file under the revised BSD license. 

This is lawful because the revised BSD license permits users to release the combination under the GPL. 


It does no such thing and then an Alexander Terekhov steps in and comprehensively buries Stallman.    He starts

This may be *your* "usual interpretation of the revised BSD license" but there is nothing in the revised BSD license allowing relicensing" 
under the GPL. 

He then quotes law citing cases and takes Stallman down.  Stallman never comes back to him and not surprisingly because Terekhov is the real deal and knows his law.  So anything you are reading from the FSF on this is to be taken cum grano salis.    

Mark

h...@ancell-ent.com

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Jan 11, 2015, 8:19:03 PM1/11/15
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From: Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2015 09:39:56 -0800 (PST)
 
[...]
 
BTW, I strongly advise making the Shen site GPL free, or cleanly segregating any GPL material and allowing no non-permissive licensed code in the standard library.  For the same reason as changing the Shen license to BSD: the less someone has to think about legal issues before using any of the Shen ecosystem, the better for its adaption.  Any viral license deliberately and intentionally imposes additional conditions in an otherwise permissive license environment.
 
I'd agree with that - certainly the library is at the moment GPL free - since everything there is mine or Willi's I'll talk with him on Monday about transitioning to 3-clause BSD which makes life simple.  I assume you are talking here of a policy decision, not a legal one.
 
Yes I am, purely policy.  No RMS "cooties" as I put in an a jocular Hacker News posting.
 
[...]
 
Anyway, enough of that, I'll close with two bits of humor; first a Not Necessarily Safe For Your Sanity (but really not that bad) mock advertisement of "GNU, a new fragrance by RMS" http://i.imgur.com/88Jgz.jpg and a very funny XKCD cartoon: http://xkcd.com/225/ (note Eric S. Raymond is (in)famously a gun owner).
 
- Harold
 
Yes; the perfume ad is funny.
 
And in truth, while it's always possible he's let himself go, there was nothing wrong with his personal hygiene when were were ... uh ... "close" ^_^.  But he's been known to play up to that stereotype to deliberately freak people out.  He didn't like the straight-laced Texans from Texas Instruments, who did their own Lisp Machines Inc. (LMI) derived version of the Lisp Machine ... and saved LMI in several different ways when the money ran out (see below).
 
Normally I shy from personality stuff, because it can be thought to be ad hominem, but here I think the personality and history stuff is relevant because the FSF have authorship of the GPL and it is long enough and complex enough to act as a Venus flytrap....
 
[...]
 
Indeed. 
 
Some bits on that from my LMI viewpoint:

Richard Greenblatt’s proposal for a Lisp machine company had two premises. First, there should be no outside investment. This would have been totally unrealistic: a company manufacturing computer hardware needs capital.

Indeed.  For a couple of months in 1982 or so we worked without pay, hoping/waiting for TI to come to our aid, which they did in every way needed except talent.

Second, Greenblatt himself would be the CEO. The other members of the Lisp machine project were extremely dubious of Greenblatt’s ability to run a company....

They were right.  He couldn't attract anyone with a hardware background to work on the design of the new CPU, and the company would have likely died in 1983 if I hadn't recruited a brilliant classmate who then put in many "100 hour weeks" (which he later said weren't worth it, but then again he later married a classmate I also recruited into the company, so I think it all worked out :-).

Stallman’s characterization of this as “backstabbing”, and that Symbolics decided not “not have scruples”, is pure hogwash. There was no backstabbing whatsoever. Symbolics was extremely scrupulous. Stallman’s characterization of Symbolics as “looking for ways to destroy” LMI is pure fantasy.

Pure fantasy when I was at LMI.  For a variety of reasons I became our "intelligence officer" of the MI6 variety, and as part of that carefully traded information with various friends who were Symbolics employees.  This was easy because we were all part of a crusade to bring Lisp to the world, and there was plenty of room for both companies until Lisp was Officially Blamed for the crash of the expert systems bubble in the '80s, when the AI and even deeper Lisp Winters in the US started.
 
That said, a different part of Symbolics did a grossly unethical thing with Macsyma, true software hording that enraged Danny Hillis, a friend who I had to tell LMI couldn't deliver Lisp Machines soon enough for Thinking Machines to develop his Connection Machine.  Strangely enough, RMS doesn't seem to talk about this travesty of perhaps the first Lisp killer app, which all but killed it.
 
This bit of a comment by Thomas Lord, a several times FSF employee who'd drunk the Kool-Aid as an undergraduate, is telling about RMS's stewardship of the GNU project and the FSF:
 
If the goal of the Free Software Movement has been to free users from the control of vendors, then today’s open source systems have achieved that goal in theory only. In practice, users are utterly dependent on a small number of open source vendors and rarely have the realistic option to evade the control of those vendors by just “using the source”. Stallman changed the competitive landscape for large vendors of systems software and that’s helped lower the price of some software commodities but he so far hasn’t done much to increase the software freedoms directly experienced by all that many users.
 
He goes into details.
 
Ah, and Ed Schwalenberg, a very good friend of mine, was an eyewitness to the creation of EMACS, he was the other cited beta tester along with Dan.  He told me the same story of the origin, and how RMS then took over the invention's future development and made it a lot better.  As Guy Steele accurately says, "RMS still deserves 99% or 99.9% or 99.99% or 99.999% of the credit for taking a package of TECO macros and turning it into the most powerful editor on the planet."  But incremental improvement is a very different thing than invention, and RMS's almost exclusive strength is the later.  Ed's account was independently related to me in the period 1979-1980, before the myth making began....
 
- Harold
 
 

Michael Bradley, Jr.

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Jan 11, 2015, 9:17:12 PM1/11/15
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On Sunday, January 11, 2015 at 10:01:04 AM UTC-6, Harold Ancell wrote:
Let this be my last unprompted contribution to our 2 Minute Hate of the FSF/GPL/RMS (but feel free to ask specific questions):
 
<snip>
 
E.g. our publishing and serious work in improving and bug fixing an version of EMACS that we shipped with source code was a worse crime than stealing that same code (RMS claimed he had received an email from Gosling that gave him permission, but never was able to produce a copy of such a vital document, and Gosling denied it).  And I knew the low level C source at an intimate level, GNU Emacs was most definitely legally a derived work, it was most unwise to do this, for UniPress could have nailed him to the wall and severely damaged the GNU project in its cradle.  His stewardship of GNU/FSF software projects is really that bad (and there's lots, lots more about GNU Emacs going forward, e.g. look into the Lucid fork.  GCC also once forked, and the other GNU/FSF marque project, the infamous Hurd operation system, is 29 years in the making and pretty obviously never going make it).
 
<snip>


In a previous message I indicated my non-advocacy of the GPL and misgivings about Stallman and the FSF.  I see no need to elaborate on those points, but I would like to say something positive about several popular pieces (or collections, really) of GPL'd software.

I'm a "convert" to and huge fan of GNU Emacs. I also keep up paid licenses for a couple of commercial IDEs, but in my experience Emacs has everything else beat. Being able to work in and freely customize a software development environment that "breathes Lisp" (even if the dialect is a little wanting) is a real joy. I realize the history of its development is a little muddy, but I'm grateful for GNU Emacs and would not hesitate to walk up to Stallman and personally thank him if I had the opportunity to do so. A good question is to what extent GNU Emacs as we have it today (robust and cross-platform) is owed to the GPL? I honestly don't know, but would not be outright dismissive of arguments that the GPL has played a large part in its overall success.

Also, GPL'd Linux and GNU coreutils (and findutils, etc.) are an integral part of my daily work. If the chips had fallen a little differently, could some BSD Unix or a BSD licensed Linux (and tools) be filling that same role today? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure a future student of history will some day write a dissertation on that very question.

I'm not attempting to initiate a long, drawn out discussion of these matters. But I thought I should say something nice in addition to what I wrote previously.

Mark Tarver

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Jan 12, 2015, 6:13:20 AM1/12/15
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I don't think RMS, as a person, is that central to this thread except in that certain misconceptions have been propagated from him and the FSF as regards BSD and licensing.  And I need to address them.

Regarding Stallman, he did do a lot of useful work 20-30 years ago, but IMO he has held the OS movement back for at least a decade.   Calling closed source developers thieves and so on really just polarises people and does not advance thinking (its also wrong).   Normally as one gets older one gravitates from hacking to managerial status and Stallman should have done that and moreover, dealt with the serious social questions (e.g. how does libre software flourish in a capitalist society where stuff has to be paid for) by donning a suit and arguing the case at a high level - at government level for instance.

But he cannot do that;  essentially he is stuck where he was back in the '80s with the same message.   And he is just not managerial.  So he is something of a tragic figure really and this would not matter a damn except nobody else is filling the gap and this failure to transition has left the OS movement divided and rudderless.    

Regarding Linux/Unix, even before Linux operating systems were gravitating to Windows or Unix - TOPS-20 and VMS were going; it was really a sort of Darwinian process.  And programmers did share things back in the 80s - it was just that there was no internet so sharing was rather in-house.   Open source was really there from the beginning, it just lacked a technology.   When the internet arrived Stallman and ESR in different ways put a narrative on what was already natural; a narrative that I think was flawed (esp. in Stallman's case because he turned it into an ethical issue).  

Yes, it's nice to say nice things about people, but you also have to point out the truth because unless you confront what is wrong, nothing gets fixed.   Also I actually do believe that credit should be given where due and I suppose that Weinreb and Harold and Theo and me too are, in different ways, trying to put history right.

Mark

Mark Tarver

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Jan 12, 2015, 7:53:05 AM1/12/15
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I should say parenthetically, that as far as Emacs is concerned, I wasn't there and I present these first-hand accounts for people to read and digest if they wish.  The licensing stuff is my interest.  FWIW, Wikipedia has this to say

Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, Richard Stallman used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs.[citation needed] Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more flexible."[3]

UniPress began selling Gosling Emacs (which it renamed Unipress Emacs) as a proprietary product,[citation needed] and controversially, asked Stallman to stop distributing Gosling Emacs source code. UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent Free Software Foundation,[citation needed] believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.[citation needed] All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56, with the possible exception of a few particularly hairy sections of the display code.

Mark

Mark Tarver

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Jan 12, 2015, 7:55:53 AM1/12/15
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I'll say that unless people have got anything they want to add about GPL and BSD or they think my interpretation is wrong, we can probably move from this thread.

Mark

h...@ancell-ent.com

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Jan 12, 2015, 5:30:12 PM1/12/15
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From: Mark Tarver <dr.mt...@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:55:53 -0800 (PST)
 
I'll say that unless people have got anything they want to add about GPL and BSD or they think my interpretation is wrong, we can probably move from this thread.
 
Agreed.  Let me reply to Mr. Bradley's good posting and correct the ... most certainly [citation needed] ... incorrect bits in Wikipedia and close my part off.  It's been useful in explaining the project's licensing posture, which is foundational to the project, but not the stuff itself of the project.
 
On Monday, 12 January 2015 12:53:05 UTC, Mark Tarver wrote:
 
[...] FWIW, Wikipedia has this to say

Since Gosling had permitted its unrestricted redistribution, Richard Stallman used some Gosling Emacs code in the initial version of GNU Emacs.[citation needed]

Absolutely false, even per RMS's account as of the mid-'80s: as previously stated, he forked it wholesale claiming authorization through a "lost" email from James Gosling, who denies sending any. 

Among other things, he rewrote part of the Gosling code headed by the skull-and-crossbones comment and made it "...shorter, faster, clearer and more flexible."[3]

The redisplay code, which I indeed avoided touching, was ugly and most likely could have used a rewrite.
Ah, there's a bit of history here.  A friend who went off to CMU for grad school (and before that did one of the first 2 EMACS clones, "Sine ("Sine Is Not Eine")" per Wikipedia, for the Architecture Machine Group (later to gain notoriety as the Media Lab) Magic Six Interdata Multics like OS ... lots of us worked on versions of EMACS before the ecosystem narrowed down to UNIX and Microsoft) related in a visit that CMU, where Gosling developed his EMACS, was terribly primitive when it came to computer hardware, it was all terminals connected at 1200 baud (!).  That's quite slow, especially when trying to redisplay as little as possible of a 24x80 video terminal dispay, with code supporting almost dumb to very smart terminals (e.g. some/many? could move a whole section up or down, very useful for inserting or deleting a line).
So for Gosling there was an extreme priority in making redisplay consume the minimum number of characters including terminal control codes.  Compare to the UNIX™"ed" editor (the first I learned, it was punch cards before then), which had a single error message, "?".  That's because it was developed using 110 baud Teletypes, a speed so slow I never experienced it myself, about 11 characters a second, maybe 300 baud if you're lucky.
By the time RMS started his fork, or more likely when he rewrote the redisplay code, anyone directly connected had faster speeds, and I suppose we should pity the people using 1200 baud modems to dial in (faster modems didn't become common until, say, the late '80s).
I mention this all because a whole lot of architectural decisions depend on the hardware they're going to run on.  Our host can no doubt pick a year before which Qi and Shen would have been much less practical for most people's easily available computing resources.

[...] UniPress never took legal action against Stallman or his nascent Free Software Foundation,[citation needed] believing "hobbyists and academics could never produce an Emacs that could compete" with their product.[citation needed]

Self-contradictory, in that Gosling Emacs was a product of academia.  As was most or every other EMACS besides Multics Emacs in that period.  And I heard from the UniPress owners' mouths in 1986 that they believed it would only grow the market for EMACS, and their professionally supported version (around 2 full time employees) would compete well.  Plus they related how they'd had an awful experience being illegitimately sued in a case they eventually slam dunk won when the other side's lawyer was caught by the police burglarizing their office at night!!!  They were menches.

All Gosling Emacs code was removed from GNU Emacs by version 16.56, with the possible exception of a few particularly hairy sections of the display code.

Both not true and irrelevant, it was still a derived work in copyright law outside of RMS/FSF's ... interpretations of the law.  That one of the 2-3 successful marque efforts of the GNU project was born in sin like this might have something to do with their subsequent and to this day IP postures....

 
On Monday, 12 January 2015 11:13:20 UTC, Mark Tarver wrote:
 
[...]   
 
Regarding Linux/Unix, even before Linux operating systems were gravitating to Windows or Unix - TOPS-20 and VMS were going; it was really a sort of Darwinian process.  And programmers did share things back in the 80s - it was just that there was no internet so sharing was rather in-house.
 
Well, a lot of tapes and later floppies passed back and forth, and some of us were lucky to be on the ARPAnet, e.g. I can remember looking for "open source" TEX stuff on Stanford in ~1981.  It became part of the Internet in 1983, and the latter just kept on growing and growing.  As I very vaguely recall, at least some software was also distributed by USENET, or simply sent point to point in the background using it.  And do any of remember BBSes and xmodem et. al.?
 
[...] 
 
Yes, it's nice to say nice things about people, but you also have to point out the truth because unless you confront what is wrong, nothing gets fixed.   Also I actually do believe that credit should be given where due and I suppose that Weinreb and Harold and Theo and me too are, in different ways, trying to put history right.
 
Indeed.  Since I was a witness to a lot of interesting things in the '70s and especially 80s, one of my explicit purposes in writing mini-essays like this is to preserve the history, especially contexts like how hardware so often determined software architecture.  E.g. the average sizes of objects in Lisp vs. Smalltalk.
 
On Monday, 12 January 2015 02:17:12 UTC, Michael Bradley, Jr. wrote:
 
[ Me on bad legal and stewardship actions by RMS/GNU/FSF. ]

In a previous message I indicated my non-advocacy of the GPL and misgivings about Stallman and the FSF.  I see no need to elaborate on those points, but I would like to say something positive about several popular pieces (or collections, really) of GPL'd software.

I'm a "convert" to and huge fan of GNU Emacs. I also keep up paid licenses for a couple of commercial IDEs, but in my experience Emacs has everything else beat. Being able to work in and freely customize a software development environment that "breathes Lisp" (even if the dialect is a little wanting) is a real joy. I realize the history of its development is a little muddy, but I'm grateful for GNU Emacs and would not hesitate to walk up to Stallman and personally thank him if I had the opportunity to do so. A good question is to what extent GNU Emacs as we have it today (robust and cross-platform) is owed to the GPL? I honestly don't know, but would not be outright dismissive of arguments that the GPL has played a large part in its overall success.
 
As a single integrated "product", collection, what have you, it's in a category of software where the GPL is generally acknowledged to be "mostly harmless".  It's not at all modular: say the core, bytecoded Lisp
implementation, and the many, many ELisp packages.  And I haven't looked at it after it became GUI capable, which no doubt intertwingled a lot of previous clean interfaces.
 
But if I wanted to e.g. rewrite all but the ELisp in, say, Rust, I wouldn't GPL that code, and I'd use the ELisp code without concern ... well, I'd wear my body armor a lot more religiously when I go outside.

Also, GPL'd Linux and GNU coreutils (and findutils, etc.) are an integral part of my daily work. If the chips had fallen a little differently, could some BSD Unix or a BSD licensed Linux (and tools) be filling that same role today? Maybe, maybe not. I'm sure a future student of history will some day write a dissertation on that very question.
 
As a student of history, I think I can answer this question: absolutely, but delayed by a few years.  The University of California at Berkeley, one of the top 4 CS schools in the world, created their Berkeley Software Distribution, "BSD", from a fork and following cross fertilizations from AT&T Bell Labs Research UNIX, and is the only remaining "true" UNIX IMHO.  Version 6 -> 1BSD, Version 7 -> 2BSD (the first OS I bare metal installed, in 1981), 32V -> 3BSD, which is where it really came into its own, 32V was a quick hack that did not page, only swapped, 3BSD had its own virtual memory system.  Its technical success prompted funding from DARPA to provide a standard UNIX platform for research.
 
The rest of the relevant history seems to be adequately and concisely covered in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#Net.2F2_and_legal_troubles  which closes with paraphrasing Linus Torvalds saying he probably wouldn't have even written Linux if BSD had been legally available.

I'm not attempting to initiate a long, drawn out discussion of these matters. But I thought I should say something nice in addition to what I wrote previously.
 
Hopefully I've said enough nice things about RMS, but I'll add that when I showed up on the scene, writing and improving versions of EMACS was a very big thing (about half the technical work I did in the '80s), and everyone acknowledged RMS as the man who made EMACS truly great.  Guy Steele's previously quoted praise from eye witnessing it before then is not exaggerated.
 
- Harold

deech

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Jan 12, 2015, 5:47:58 PM1/12/15
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Don't have much of substance to contribute, but I just have to say I've been reading these historical accounts with a big 'ol smile on my face. An ASCII rendering doesn't do it justice but here it is anyway, :).
-deech

Mark Thom

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Jan 12, 2015, 10:15:35 PM1/12/15
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Yes, it is very interesting stuff.
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