[Corpora-List] concordance program for large files

[Francis Tyers]

El mié, 03-09-2008 a las 16:05 +0200, Max Silberztein escribió:
> Francis,
> 
> I agree with you: no flame war!

Cool! :)

> 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.

No comment. This is about the software, not the company / organisation.

> 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.

>>From what I understood from your post, they made a GPL version of a
non-GPL piece of software. No code was copied. If code was copied then
that is another issue.

> 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?

GPL licence violations are another issue. They can be, and have been successfully 
pursued through the court system.[1]

> 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?

I do not condone unauthorised copying of software code (what you refer
to as "piracy"). However, if someone writes something that works the
same as your software with their own code and their own hands, this
should not be a problem. I don't believe in software patents.

My understanding of the original post was that someone had replicated
the functionality of your software as a piece of free software. This is
something I completely endorse. There are many pieces of free software
which have started out as "clones" of other pieces of non-free software,
and have in time become better. If this wasn't the case, my apologies
for the "holier than thou" earlier response.

Regards,

Fran

1. http://gpl-violations.org/


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