Re: Unhappy campers
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Re: Unhappy campers
in comp.os.minix, vladimir@Eng.Sun.COM (Vladimir Ivanovic) said:
>>>>>> On 4 Feb 92 20:57:40 GMT, fnf@fishpond.uucp (Fred Fish) said:
>
>fnf> If PH was not granted a monopoly on distribution, it would have been
>fnf> possible for all of the interested minix hackers to organize and set
>fnf> up a group that was dedicated to producing enhanced-minix. This aim
>fnf> of this group could have been to produce a single, supported version
>fnf> of minix with all of the commonly requested enhancements. This would
>fnf> have allowed minix to evolve in much the same way that gcc has evolved
>fnf> over the last few years. Sure there are variant versions of gcc, but
>fnf> most of the really good enhancements, bug fixes, etc are eventually
>fnf> folded back into a master source base that future distributions derive
>fnf> from. Thus you would have been left in peace to continue your tight
>fnf> control over the educational version of minix, and everyone else that
>fnf> wanted more than an educational tool could put their energies into
>fnf> enhanced-minx.
>
>I don't get it. What's preventing people from doing this? The quoted
>paragraph doesn't give any reasons for its assertions.
>
As I understand it PH takes the position that the copyright must be observed,
and that distribution of modified copies of their copyrighted code is in
violation of the copyright. I think that they are required to defend the
copyright against such violations if they want it to remain legally valid.
Diffs against the baseline are allowed. But diffs have to be applied in strict
order. This would be difficult to administer in a tight-knit organization
with well defined distribution channels. In net.anarchy it's all but
unworkable.
The fact that the Minix-386 variant of PC Minix 1.5 has managed to remain
stable as a set of diffs suprises me. I recall that the NLMUG Minix variant
was distributed as modified baseline code instead of as diffs, and that PH
copyright lawyers put a stop to that.
Or do I have it wrong?
--
mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)