Exercises/Problems for Discussion

Section: Exercises/Problems for Discussion

  1. A college's director of computing services pays for ten copies of a program which she expects will be used by at most ten persons at any one time, but installs the program on one hundred computers. Comment on the moral and legal propriety.

  2. Richard Stallman believes that the Golden Rule obliges him to give away the software he finds to be useful. The law won't allow him to do this with software copyrighted by others, so he and his associates write similar software themselves and then give it away. Read Stallman's "The GNU Manifesto" (http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/manifesto.html) and comment on Stallman's belief and practice.

    Also see Stallman's "What Is Copyleft?" with link to the GNU General Public License, and "Why Software Should Not Have Owners"


rms@cs.oberlin.edu