Re: GNU Win32? Not anymore.
Bruce, you misundrestood what I was ASKING. I was asking would it be
allowed to say this software is free, but "more" free for others. That
would probably solve Cygnus's problems.
Shaya
On Thu, 10 Jul 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > Yes and No, Is it discrimination to say it's free, but "more" free for
> > most uses. This sounds like animal farm, "4 legs good, 2 legs better". :-)
>
> Huh?
>
> I read it pretty clearly as "It's free unless you are our competitor, in
> which case you have to negociate a special license with us." Did you not
> read it this way? That sounds like a pretty clear violation of the
> discrimination test.
>
> I think it's pretty funny that they criticise their competitor for
> porting GCC to the R5000 and never merging the code back in, since
> Cygnus, not the competitor, is the the entity that is currently in
> charge of merging patches back into GCC. They have been a problem with
> merging in other patches as well, such as the Pentium optimization ones.
>
> I think that the problem is that the founders of CyGNUs are no longer
> involved with the company, and the business people who are now in charge
> have come to realize that being in the free software business is not as
> profitable as being in the embedded systems business like Wind River with
> its $1.1 Billion valuation. They see their product going into building the
> Sojurner rover (it's running Wind River) and they get no credit and their
> competitors stock goes up, and they get annoyed. Those business people
> don't have the same principles as the founders of CyGNUs, they have no
> love for free software, they just want to own their work now.
>
> If they had wanted to be fair about keeping the software free, they would
> have made a license that _required_ people who derive software to feed back
> the changes that they made to it. That would have taken care of most of
> their complaints without restricting who used the software for what.
>
> Commercial companies should contribute to free software, but they
> shouldn't necessarily become the main maintainers of it. Who wants
> to send patches back to Cygnus when Cygnus is their direct competitor?
> I'd rather send the patches to SPI.
>
> Thanks
>
> Bruce
> --
> Bruce Perens K6BP bruce@pixar.com 510-215-3502
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