Charging the net....

[Peter da Silva]

In article <sean.672356159 at s.ms.uky.edu> sean at ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
> "Grassroots" profiteering is NOT in the spirit of Usenet. Usenet has
> been traditionally free. There is no Usenet tradition of binding
> people to licenses and requiring payment.

I don't want to start a debate on the relative merits of the GPL and
shareware, but the following statement is not entirely true:

> Traditionally, anything one
> picked up from Usenet could be used without fear of litigation.

Under the current version of the GPL, there are tools that have been
distributed over Usenet that can not be freely used without fear of
litigation. The difference between these programs and shareware has
nothing to do with lawsuits and everything to do with money.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  `-_-'  peter at ferranti.com
+1 713 274 5180.  'U`  "Have you hugged your wolf today?"