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- From: tzs@carson.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith)
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer,comp.os.ms-windows.programmer.tools
- Subject: Re: Stallman and friends
- Message-ID: <1iqu6pINNrpd@shelley.u.washington.edu>
- Date: 11 Jan 93 04:48:25 GMT
- Article-I.D.: shelley.1iqu6pINNrpd
- References: <lkka7mINNc6u@news.bbn.com> <lsr-050193184857@lsr.taligent.com> <MELLON.93Jan7172402@pepper.ncd.com>
- Organization: University of Washington School of Law, Class of '95
- Lines: 14
- NNTP-Posting-Host: carson.u.washington.edu
-
- mellon@ncd.com (Ted Lemon) writes:
- >RMS has reason to believe otherwise. Ask him about Macsyma sometime.
- >Macsyma was developed at the MIT AI lab using government funding and
- >was commonly held by the programmers there to be in the public domain.
- >Then Symbolics negotiated a deal with MIT wherein MIT transferred the
- >copyright to Symbolics.
-
- If the code was in the public domain, there was no copyright to transfer.
- MIT could not prevent anyone from doing anything they wanted to do with
- the code -- that's how public domain works. In particular, they could
- not take it out of public domain (although they could make changes, and
- those changes would not be public domain).
-
- --Tim Smith
-