[Octal-dev] everybody wins.

[Dave O'Toole]

> I read through the GNU agreements and can see your point.  When I bought
> the RedHat (a stock exchange listed company) installation I paid for it
> and it contained, what appears to be, quite a bit of GNU software such
> as the c compiler I am using.  This worry about not making money and that
> someone might use freely distributed code in proprietary software is
> impractical and apparently a bit inconsistent.  If someone can make a

I think we are having a major misunderstanding; perhaps I should have
explained the issue more fully myself rather than referring you to
legalese. (That should teach me for replying to emails in the wee hours
of the morning.)  

*None* of this has anything to with who is making money or whether a
commercial company could use your plugins in proprietary software. These
are nonissues with respect to GNU's policy on accepting
contributions---the rationale for this policy is entirely practical. 

GNU does not want to be sued because they distributed code which they
had no right to distribute. This is a very real possibility when
thousands of people over the whole world are contributing to various GNU
projects. It could happen when code is included without the author's
consent, or when an author consents but he forgets about a "work for
hire" agreement with his employer (in which he may have agreed to assign
copyright for any code he writes to the company.) Needless to say, any
such suit could result in huge legal costs, monetary damages, and
possibly in the crippling of a vital GNU program (such as GCC) if a
court ordered that the offending code be removed. 

Nobody wants this. 

Hence when accepting code to distribute, GNU simply wants to make sure
they have the right to legally do so. They do this by either 1) being
assigned copyright to the code, 2) obtaining a written license for the
code, or 3) using public domain code. In many cases, they also want
employers to disclaim copyright interest, because of the kinds of
contracts I mentioned. Once they are sure it's safe to do so, they will
gladly mirror the code around the world. 

This is all I was talking about. There is nothing political about this
whatsoever. I am not pulling any punches, there is no agenda. My
personal position is that free software is more valuable when it is a
choice---this is the "Paradise Lost" argument. In an ideal world this
would be no problem, but the FSF deals with, and is trying to change, a
copyright system that is the antithesis of its goals. Therefore GNU
takes precautions to protect itself from the system. 

In a nutshell, distribution on GNU ftp is subject to rules designed to
protect GNU legally, and I cannot disregard these rules simply because
it would make OCTAL more convenient to distribute. 

Fortunately there is an "everybody wins" solution that would solve this
completely. 

> Clearly, if you will not accept my software in your distribution, I am
> throwing software at a brick wall.  Software becomes essentially free
> when there are recognized free locations from where it can be obtained.

My point earlier is that this "free location" would be SourceForge
(there are few other central sites so "recognized"!), where **everyone**
in the Octal community could distribute their plugins, and where users
could download a "full package distribution" consisting of Octal plus
all the plugins you can think of, including yours. If you want, it can
be in a single tarball. Per the GPL it is fine to redistribute GNU code
in this fashion. By the same token, if Octal becomes a component of
Linux distributions (which isn't too unlikely considering how many of
them also include things like Coleco Adam emulators :-) then your
plugins may be distributed as part of a Linux distro someday, and all
the authors will recieve full credit.

I would like to correct your analogy from earlier, where you likened me
to RedHat: in this scenario, GNU is still GNU, but *SourceForge* is
RedHat. And it is a very convenient, public sort of RedHat, to which
anyone can contribute plugins, songs, patches, instruments,
whatever---with no hassle. Such a hosting solution (with a web server,
database, PHP, CVS, the works) is capable of building a much more
impressive and powerful online tracker's community center than is, say,
an ftp directory at GNU. Surely this will be the main focus as Octal
reaches maturity in the coming months. 

These are the reasons why I have suggested we use Sourceforge or some
neutral host as the distribution site. I implore you, do not think that
this is because I have some political axe to grind, or because I don't
want other people's code for some reason, or because I want to get
something out of people. None of these is the case. If you have
philosophical disagreements with GNU, that is fine, but please know that
the GPL will protect your work no less surely for it. 

A year ago, Octal was just an idea. It's hard for me to communicate how
grateful I am that anyone will pay attention to this project at all,
much less take time to learn a new API and work to create plugins. I
want it to succeed, because it will be so good to have a free music
creation tool that is as powerful as Buzz. And I think it is great of
you to help. So please believe that there is no way I would pass up the
chance to distribute your contributions via GNU ftp unless there was a
very good reason. 

-- 
@@@ david o'toole
@@@ address@hidden
@@@ www.gnu.org/software/octal