Re: for the "love of HURD"

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 18:04 +0000, Daniel Martin wrote:
   > No, the Hurd doesn't belong to RMS. Just as GNU doesn't belong to
   > RMS.

   FSF requires an assignment agreement for all contributions to FSF
   projects. As I understand it, the Hurd is an FSF project. If so,
   the Hurd belongs to FSF. This is a legal statement, not a
   philosophical statement.

The Hurd does not belong to the FSF in anyway.  The FSF might be the
copyright holders, but they are not the owners of the Hurd.  Anyone
can take the Hurd and make a fork of it, and many users have their own
private versions of the Hurd with their local hacks.

The FSF and GNU project are even against the whole bizar concept of
owning software, see for example the essay Why Software Should Not
Have Owners.

   > Like all free software if it belongs to anyone it belongs to it's
   > users.  But then software is just mathematics, it's not property,
   > so how can it belong to anyone?

   Spoken like someone who has absolutely no idea how intellectual
   property works in the law.

The term "intellectual property" has no meaning in law, it is a vauge
word mixing several differnt and unrelated topics into the same bowl
(copyright, trademark, patents).  What Daniel Martin said is entierly
correct.

Owning software is makes as much sense as owning PI.