Re: EMC - a practical implementation?

[Brian Bartholomew <bb-at-wv.com>]

> Don't get carried away with indignity that someone who is looking to
> hi-jack the whole project for commercial gain. These people wish to
> put it in a pretty package on one CD where the end user inserts and
> presses go. They are not in the business of doing the hard work by
> writing the software then proving it, they are marketing salesmen
> and as such when and if the software gets to the stage of insert and
> go the likes of you and me will be cut out by copy-write law suits
> as they claim it all as their own idea.  EMC will no longer be FREE.

| This cannot happen.  The software may NOT be copyrighted by a 3rd
| party, and anyone attempting to do so may become a violator of
| federal law.  The can sell it as part of a package.  But, they
| probably can't sell it (the software) standalone for more than a
| reasonable cost of media and production.  And, they absolutely,
| certainly cannot prevent anyone else from using it, distributing it
| or selling it.  This would be almost like somebody coming in the
| night, stealing your car and then leasing it back to you.  Property
| they CLEARLY DO NOT OWN cannot become theirs, just because they say
| so.  I'm sure NIST knows how to deal with this sort of thing, it
| must have come up before.

I'm confused.  I thought EMC, as required for tax-funded government-
developed software, was public domain.  The design goal of such terms
is that companies commercialize it, because this is thought to
distribute the created value back to taxpayers the best.

(Ignore this post if I'm confused because I came in late)


A member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) http://lpf.ai.mit.edu
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Brian Bartholomew - bb-at-wv.com - www.wv.com - Working Version, Cambridge, MA