What are you missing? [LWN.net]

What are you missing?

Posted May 24, 2005 17:27 UTC (Tue) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330)
In reply to: What are you missing? by kune
Parent article: Public Domain Enhancement Act reintroduced

It wouldn't hurt the GNU effort any to put extremely old versions in the public domain; the more recent and usable stuff would still be copylefted.

For example, there was discussion some time back of a "Founder's Copyright". The idea was that the first American copyright law had a term of 14 years, renewable once for another 14 year term. The idea would be that a copyright holder could voluntarily agree to put a work in the public domain after 28 years. So, if RMS so decided, he could make the first public release of Emacs public domain in 2013 (1985+28). Such ancient software would only be of historical interest, and would probably have value only to researchers and historians. It wouldn't be of much value to the proprietary software developers of 2013.

(Log in to post comments)

What are you missing?

Posted May 24, 2005 18:59 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

I once tried to find a really old version of Emacs and a really old
version of the Gimp. The earliest Gimp I could find was 0.54 and that
wasn't from any official website. I'm not sure anymore what the outcome
of my searches for an ancient emacs version were -- but I came away with
the idea that it might very well become really hard to find source code
to application version from before the prime-time freeware CD
distributions in the future.

What are you missing?

Posted May 24, 2005 20:36 UTC (Tue) by emkey (guest, #144) [Link]

I seem to recall emacs source being 10mb uncompressed around 1989 or so. I have no idea what it is today. In any case, given how small drives were at the time that may go a long way towards explaining why it is so hard to find really old versions of emacs.

I'm sure there are some old cartridge tapes out there with copies. Good luck reading 'em though.

What are you missing?

Posted May 25, 2005 6:10 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

In those days (1985) you got your Emacs on a big fat 1600 bpi magtape, by mail, sent by RMS himself (back when he was sleeping on the floor at MIT and using the fees he charged for tape duplication to buy food).

Yes, I'm old (though not as old as RMS).

What are you missing?

Posted May 25, 2005 9:32 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

0.54 is a seriously old version of The GIMP (e.g. it's older than the GIMP toolkit itself). I don't know anyone who has run an earlier version, although obviously Spence & Pete must have had some reason to call it 0.54 rather than say 0.1 or 1.0...

The GIMP was a project for a class, so it's quite possible that earlier versions, especially those with substantially less functionality, never existed outside of a private version control system.