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Do you even know what GPLed software is? It is basically public domain - and guarantees any derivative works are also public domain. It requires source to be bundled with the distro.

The reason for it was because Richard Stallman got burned when he originally released Emacs as public domain. Several commercial software houses stole his work and used it in proprietary code. To prevent this, he had the GPL worked up so that any code affected by it and any derivative works would have to be freely available to the public. A programmer can charge for distributing the code and can charge for maintaining the code (if he can find anyone who will pay), but the source code base itself is totally free.

Do you even know what GPLed software is? It is basically public domain - and guarantees any derivative works are also public domain. It requires source to be bundled with the distro.

I think you're missing the point of the article. If someone wants to release their code under GPL (or any license), I don't have a problem with it. It's their software.

But in the case of govt-funded software... It ain't their software. It's our software, and therefore it should be "public domain". And GPL software isn't "public-domain" software.

Please see my earlier post on the "public-domain", govt-funded LINPACK/LAPACK software.

The reason for it was because Richard Stallman got burned when he originally released Emacs as public domain. Several commercial software houses stole his work and used it in proprietary code.

Right, but wrong. There was only one other person involved. James Gosling (one of the co-inventors of Java, btw) forked off a branch of Emacs and sold it as Unipress Emacs. In response, Stallman threw away the entire Emacs code base, invented the GPL and rewrote it from scratch. That was actually a good thing, because in the process he used a full-fledged Lisp interpreter as the engine instead of the half-baked Mocklisp in Unipress Emacs.

XEmacs is another Emacs fork, however we have kept XEmacs GPL (we have to). He hates us anyway. XEmacs has also had a fork. For awhile, a variation of XEmacs called InfoDock was sold as a commercial product, still under the GPL with full source code available.

It was with great joy, by the way, the day I removed Mocklisp support from XEmacs.