Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> You got the order of events all wrong. There was no PD software as we
> know it know at the moment Stallman created the GPL.

I'm not sure I understand this comment (the 'as we know it part').
There was a PD before Stallman started pushing the GPL (i.e. before
GCC). Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, BBS's and others had loads of it.
I think you're linking Open Source to Public Domain, which is not
even close. One of the problems with Public Domain is that others
have taken the PD work and change the info and called it their
work. This had happened to me on 2 occasions. One was some
EPROM burner software I wrote, the other for an article about
building an external keyboard for the Atari ST. Neither were
very important to anyone other than me but it changed my view
of PD.

I'm not sure someone has mentioned this yet (been a bit tough
keeping up with the circles on this thread) but
Copyright != License. Unfortunately Copyleft does include
License and Copyright. I had to investigate Open Source Licenses
for the HCS II project. I learned a lot about Copyright and
Licenses (but that doesn't make me an expert or Lawyer ;-).

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