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Discuss “Speaker faults GPL for ”

Also on Thursday, before Stallman?s lecture, Harvard law professor Greg Vetter spoke to a small audience in Newell-Simon Hall. His presentation?s title: ??Infectious? Open Source Software: Spreading Incentives or Promoting Resistance??

Vetter is a vocal advocate of open-source software (OSS); he shares the common perception that it is cheaper and less buggy than closed source. But his presentation emphasized the difference between OSS and the ?free software? protected by the GNU GPL, a system free-software advocates refer to as ?copyleft.? While Vetter supports ?99.5 percent of the GPL,? he is vocally opposed to one particular aspect: its restrictions on derivative works.

U.S. copyright law, said Vetter, is designed to protect the rights of...

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