GPL Issue

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> writes:
> Until the FSF, nobody wanted such a thing: copyright holders were
> concerned to enforce their copyrights strongly against all but a few
> licensees, whom they bound by contract in various ways (notably to pay
> money, of course).

That - specifically, the "until the FSF" part - is simply not true.
Richard Stallman did not invent open source; it was discussed in SIGPLAN
some years before, in a response to Bill Gates's "open letter to
hobbyists".  Dr Dobb's was born out of what could be considered the
first collaborative open source project, and an early issue includes the
first recorded use of the word "copyleft" (although in a looser sense
than the FSF's definition).

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no