Re: Copyright

[Ray Henry <rehenry-at-up.net>]

Cheng-Chang Wu

Interesting questions!

I am an EMC user here and don't pretend to represent NIST
or the US government.  My comments are mixed into your post.

At 10:38 AM 5/24/2000 -0400, Cheng-Chang Wu wrote:
>
>Hello,
>
>   I see from the home page linuxcnc.org that EMC is a
>open source project. But I can't find the copyright of
>it.

The EMC files themselves are all public domain and may be 
used in any manner you choose.  

>   It seems to me that EMC is a product of the
>govermant, so it is only for american firms? If it is
>really so, it can not

No.  The public NIST work on EMC is available to anyone
for any purpose whatever.  There are users scattered all over
and there are almost as many ways of using parts of EMC as there
are users. 

>   a open source project accroding to the definition.
>"Open Source" is already a trademark in USA with a
>good definition.

You are correct that there are a number of valid definitions of
open source projects in the USA.  NIST itself has not applied 
any one of the "copyleft" definitions to EMC.  

I reserved copyright on tkbackplot in it's original form but opened
the tkemc popup version as public domain. The scripts that I've
written have no explicit copyright.

Dan Falck, Matt Shaver, and I have talked a bit about this problem.  
I think that Dan will soon place the contents of linuxcnc.org under
some copyleft definition so that it will be easier for others to 
contribute to it without feeling that some big company can borrow 
it for their own inordinate profit. 

I personally would like to see you contribute to EMC rather that
spend a lot of time writing your own machine control.  But you should
feel free to use any part of the current EMC in any way that you want.  

Do you feel that you need gpl or some other copyleft protection for 
the work that you want to do?  Public domain is no protection at all!

I'd like to hear some serious discussion of this issue?  Is public
domain holding us back from serious collaborative work on EMC?

Ray