Re: OT: America's Army
On Sun, Jun 22, 2003 at 08:37:35PM -0400, Bijan Soleymani wrote:
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> > Well, if the "free license" was written to be revokable, then they
> > could revoke it. Remember, as much as some people would like to
> > think it, RMS didn't carve the GPL in stone with his finger, so
> > that Moses could carry it down the Mountain...
>
> "You're free to use this software as long as we feel like it", doesn't
> sound like a Free Software license to me.
Not now, certainly; ideas on this have evolved over time and with bitter
experience. Fairly permissive "do what you want as long as it doesn't
cause us trouble" licences used to be a lot more common than they are
today, for instance.
At the time, AT&T's source licences made Unix very popular and allowed a
lot of students to experiment with their software under
not-terribly-onerous terms. Over the years things turned nasty, but I
don't think that negates what had gone beforehand. Back then very few
people had any idea how to read or write free software licences.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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