Wine license change

[Brett Glass]

At 01:38 AM 2/14/2002, Plato wrote:

>> No, I'm not. Richard Stallman himself has stated that the purpose
>> of the GPL's "poison pill" is to turn developers against their
>> colleagues and the organizations for which they work. His writings
>> even urge programmers to put GPLed code into the work they do for
>> their employers for the express purpose of forcing them to give
>> away the code!
>
>You keep on making unsubstantiated claims like this.

You can find them as well as I can. Just go to Stallman's gnu.org
site. However, because you seem to insist on having me do your
research for you, Stallman actually says this in an essay called 
"What is Copyleft." Until January 1999, the version of the essay posted 
on the FSF site said the following:

>People who write improvements in free software often work for companies or 
>universities that would do almost anything to get money. A programmer may 
>want to contribute her changes to the community, but her employer may 'see 
>green' and insist on turning the changes into a commercial product.
>
>When we explain to the employer that it is illegal to distribute the 
>improved version except as free software, the employer usually decides to 
>release it as free software rather than throw it away.

In short, Stallman urges programmers to sabotage their employers' IP --
by injecting GPLed code into it -- so that it must be given away.

Interestingly, in a case of almost Orwellian revisionism, Stallman removed 
the bit about "seeing green" from the version of the essay that's now 
published at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html . He did this after 
I cited it on a public mailing list as an example of his strongly 
anti-business agenda. (However, the Web remembers: mirrors of the original 
text may be found throughout the Internet.) The revised essay still 
encourages programmers to incorporate GPLed code in their work as a way of 
"monkey wrenching" organizations, but it is now more subtle.

--Brett Glass