[Corpora-List] concordance program for large files

[Max Silberztein]

Francis,

I agree with you: no flame war!

However, you should know that the only people who ever bought INTEX did not buy it from my university, but from an organization called ASSTRIL run by the same guys who brought you Unitex; Unitex was born a few weeks after a lawyer forced them to stop selling INTEX, after a year-long battle.

I am puzzled by your argument: does GPL philosophy really advocate copying other people's work without proper authorization or citation? Call me naive but I thought GPL licensing was created to *protect* original authors, not to pirate them. It took me 10 years to write INTEX and I was devastated when unscrupulous colleagues plagiarized it.

Actually I believe that Unitex is an insult to the GPL community: how does Unitex-style behavior help academics feel confident that they can indeed give away the source of their work without fearing that they will be plagiarized?

Finally, your argument against the right of a small lab (which has no access to CNRS funding) to decide on its distribution policy is used by pirates to advocate copying movies/CDs/software. Don't you think there ought to be some minimal respect of author's rights, especially within the academic community?

--Max

-----Original Message-----
From: Francis Tyers [mailto:ftyers at prompsit.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2008 11:11 AM
To: max.silberztein at univ-fcomte.fr
Cc: Corpora at uib.no
Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] concordance program for large files

El mié, 03-09-2008 a las 10:53 +0200, Max Silberztein escribió:
> Unitex is a non-authorized copy of a free software named INTEX; it has not
> been "designed". See:

By "free software" I assume you mean free as in price as opposed to free
as in freedom. Unitex is licensed under the GPL and is truely free
software, which means people are free to: 

* Use it for any purpose
* Study how it works
* Share it with their friends and colleagues
* Improve it and adapt it to their needs, and then release these changes
so that everyone can benefit.

Compared to the INTEX licence where people,

* Can use it for unambiguously non-commercial purposes only
* Cannot study how it works
* Cannot share it with friends and colleagues
* Cannot improve it and adapt it to their needs, and then release these
changes so that everyone can benefit.

I'd write more, but I think the above speaks for itself and don't want
to risk getting into a flame war ;)

Fran


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