From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,52a0bacbcdd2da17 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-08-13 10:17:29 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!nntp.cs.ubc.ca!torn!snoopy.risq.qc.ca!nf3.bellglobal.com!nf1.bellglobal.com!nf2.bellglobal.com!news20.bellglobal.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 Netscape/7.1 (ax) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Realtime/embedded project to help with employment. References: <3F3A3649.4010606@noplace.com> <1060786226.23704@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> In-Reply-To: <1060786226.23704@master.nyc.kbcfp.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 13:02:27 -0400 NNTP-Posting-Host: 198.96.223.163 X-Complaints-To: abuse@sympatico.ca X-Trace: news20.bellglobal.com 1060794133 198.96.223.163 (Wed, 13 Aug 2003 13:02:13 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 13:02:13 EDT Organization: Bell Sympatico Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:41403 Date: 2003-08-13T13:02:27-04:00 List-Id: Hyman Rosen wrote: > Marin David Condic wrote: > >> They voluntarily gave up rights to something that had potential value. > > > When the actual value was realized they were out in the cold > > That code that they "gave up rights to" is now in collections > distributed by companies who have "given up rights" as well. And THIS, is precisely one of the benefits! You don't have to go fishing for, or create a purchase order for a C compiler, or an Ada compiler. GCC comes standard with these distributions for example. Whoever wrote the GNU tar utility, now benefits from having it available on new Linux releases, without pulling it out of his own private archives. I benefit too, because I didn't have write my own version of tar from scratch (saving me much personal time!) We both benefit, because files he creates are guaranteed to work with my version of tar (same code base!) And.. none of us were tempted to pirate "tar" from an individual, AT&T System V, or SCO ;-) either. Surely this is worth something too. I just think we sometimes forget about how things used to be. We forget what benefits we are profiting from now, thanks to FSF types of efforts. Again, this does not mean that charging for services is evil, but simply let's not forget the benefits of free software. -- Warren W. Gay VE3WWG http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3wwg