Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) To : comp.programming From : Gerry Quinn Date : Wed Aug 24 2005 12:42 pm In article , ajo@nospam.andrew.cmu.edu says... > Well, I was thinking of the stuff that (as you probably know) I wasn't > actually alive for --- the early operating systems, compiler technology, > the core ideas of threadedness, Fortran, Algol, Lisp, what have you. > Which, unencumbered by copyright and trade secrets (according to legend), > spread to influence a lot of work done thereafter. Ideas can't be copyrighted, and trade secrets are hard to maintain. The bottom line is that the availability of source code isn't all that important. I doubt there's ever been a bit of software widely available for which people didn't rapidly figure out how it works. - Gerry Quinn .