*BSD News Article 14701


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!gatech!usenet.ufl.edu!zoyd!kem
From: kem@zoyd.NoSubdomain.NoDomain (Kelly Murray)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux,comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: GNUified Linux vs FREE 386BSD
Date: 19 Apr 1993 18:49:18 GMT
Organization: University of Florida
Lines: 17
Sender: kem@zoyd (Kelly Murray)
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1qus7eINNcib@no-names.nerdc.ufl.edu>
References: <1993Apr15.225354.18654@samba.oit.unc.edu> <1993Apr17.161516.2794@serval.net.wsu.edu> <1993Apr17.175431.25015@coe.montana.edu> <1993Apr17.190517.4276@serval.net.wsu.edu> <1993Apr17.205715.11278@coe.montana.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: zoyd.prl.ufl.edu

A big part of GNUism is to prevent people from taking unrestricted-copyright
programs, and creating restricted-copyright or proprietary programs. 
It is ironic that GNUites are violating their own philosophy by converting
unrestricted software into restricted software. 

Software that is ``really free'', that is, released without restrictions,
provides benefits to EVERYBODY.  Everybody includes people who create
GNUified software, as well as those who create commercial software.

As an aside, because GNUified software releases source code, it is easy 
to incorporate changes made to really-free programs back into the
original code, as copyright does not cover cases where
there is substantially no other way to do something, which 
would cover most bugfix-type changes.

 -Kelly (kem@cis.ufl.edu)