I am the sole original author of NFMake, which currently appears on the GNU source code repository, and is marked “Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.”. The only problem is that I never worked for the FSF, and I certainly never assigned the copyright to them.
They claim ownership, copyright and the right to license my source code as they see fit.
For a group so focused on open source, you think they would know better.Recently, famous toe cheese eater and lead zealot of the FSF, Richard Stallman, made what some might consider comments of poor taste regarding the death of Steve Jobs.
I must admit once upon a time I shared the ideals of the FSF, but lately, not so much..
About NFMake
From the moment I laid eyes on a NeXT computer, I knew it was different. Anyone lucky enough to use a NeXT computer, or later NeXTStep or OpenStep probably felt the same way.
Those who declare themselves proponents of free software did what they most often do when confronted with something magnificent; They set about to copy without any innovation. They created a project called GNUStep designed to mimic OpenStep. They couldn’t even come up with an original name.
I confess to falling prey to this siren song. I had spent a decade programming in Objective-C and I wasn’t really quite sure if anything I wrote would be any more relevant than software I had written in AppleSoft, UCSD Pascal, or Turbo Pascal.
So I laid a plan to ensure I could take my Objective-C programs and compile them on a GNUStep target. Loathing makefiles, I created NFMake, a tool that would read the NeXT formatted Project Builder file format and build the same project on GNUStep.
The original source as I first released it
is available for you to peruse.
You will notice that nowhere in my original tarball do the initials GNU, FSF or GPL appear.
I last used NFMake when I was building software for the Palm platform. Eventually I abandoned it as GNUStep stalled, Palm died, an Apple released OSX and incredible tools like Xcode.
Copyright Who ?!?
If you do a Google search for NFMake, you can find it hosted on “gna”, the gnu project repository.
The difference is that almost every source file has had a header tacked on that starts with:
/*
Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
NFMake was not a work for hire (at least not hired by FSF), and the copyright was never assigned to them or anyone else.
Equally interesting is that the source is listed as LGPLv2, but at some point someone decided they could relicense it GPLv3, a license that I despise.
Whatever the reason, it should have never been done.
If you have ever released your source, you may want to take this moment to make sure the FSF isn’t claiming ownership of your work as well.
