re: re: freedom

[Gangolf Jobb <jobb at stat dot uni-muenchen dot de>]

>I'm working for an university, which is therefore (by French law) the
>owner of my work. As I don't want to argue with the Head of my
>university, I've done all my work on GSL on my spare time, on my own
>computer (except for sending patches from my university email
>account).

that's the way it works! thinking about a problem in your institute all 
the day while you are getting paid from public money, and then typing it 
into your computer at home. that's theft. how much spare time do you 
have, anyway? is that enough to work on such a large project? i doubt ..

of course, everybody can decide about his own software, but this does 
not seem to be the case here.

possibly, the head of your university would have chosen a more 
reasonable license than the gpl.

>Morever, you argument is completely wrong, at least for France. In
>France, there are special laws about university work that allows
>reasearchers to make commercial uses of their work, as long as the
>university receive part of the money. Commercial uses of a software as
>understand by most french universities is not compatible with free
>software. This means that if my work had been conducted at my
>university, you will not even think about using it.

i wrote "... support commercial use ... ", and not "giving away for 
free". taking a fee for good software is ok. we have similar laws here 
in germany, and i am not completely uninformed. however, in most cases 
the scientific work can be used for free. the problem with the gpl is, 
that it does not offer the possibility to buy a license. it even 
prohibits commercial use - in the sense of selling software.

why not selling software? this is nothing else than selling computer 
hardware or other things. why don`t we have a "free hardware foundation" 
? everybody shold have the right to get computers for free and should 
know about every secret inside a processor, even about those nobody is 
normally interested in.

sorry for bothering you again, but this had to be answered.

- gangolf