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Re: [News] Proprietary Software Can Never Be Bought

  • Subject: Re: [News] Proprietary Software Can Never Be Bought
  • From: Homer <usenet@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 16 Jul 2008 03:14:09 +0100
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Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:

> | The only way to change this is to move software from the licensing
>  | model to an ownership model.

I think this author's heart is in the right place, but his arguments are
completely bogus.

Software is not, and can never be, considered to be real property, since
it is not an object, it is an expression of ideas, and the nearest thing
to the transfer of ideas is called learning, which is not quite the same
thing as taking possession of an object. Ideas are bought and sold under
the current patent regime, but IMO this kind of "transfer" is unethical.

Proposing a system where "everyone becomes the owner" is effectively the
same as a system where "no one is the owner", which is a much better way
of looking at it, since surely the basic premise is to avoid exclusivity
and restriction. AFAICT this is precisely what the GPL provides, as it's
premise is inclusion rather than exclusion (hence the reason it's called
CopyLeft rather than Copyright).

One detail the author neglects to consider is the element of attribution
for created work, which surely the original author deserves. Without the
protection of a licence, how would correct attribution be maintained? He
also fails to understand that the GPL is about spreading the ideology of
Freedom through the protection of that Freedom. The free-for-all concept
that the author suggests is rather too much like the BSD, although given
that /everyone/ becomes the "owner" in his imaginary situation I suppose
that's a moot point, provided that such a system was universally adopted
and maintained, otherwise downstream recipients could simply alter their
new "property" to become proprietary software that they subsequently use
to restrict others' Freedom.

One idea that I considered is the concept of shared ownership (not to be
confused with Microsoft's Shared Source which is basically a reinvention
of other licenses). In this scenario developers would voluntarily donate
software to a foundation, that would licence this software under the GPL
and grant equal ownership to all members of this foundation, which would
included anyone who donated; distributed or even used that software. The
members of this foundation would then all be part-owners of every single
software project in that foundation's collection, and thus have an equal
right to determine the fate of all that software, including whether that
software was sold on to a third party. This would then make it extremely
difficult for predatory companies to take ownership of Free Software, as
the number of owners could potentially comprise millions of people.

The problem of exclusivity cannot be addressed by even more exclusivity,
even if it's some weird kind of universal "exclusivity". It is better by
far to think in terms of Freedom though /inclusion/. We already have the
GPL for that, since it protects our Freedom to distribute; study; modify
and use software created and copyrighted by others. The creation of some
kind of shared ownership foundation would further protect that software,
by ensuring that all future versions /remained/ Free, since transferring
ownership would be impractical. And yet even this shared ownership model
would be inclusive, as one would become an "owner" simply by /using/ the
software.

In an ideal world such "protections" would not be necessary, but as long
as there are predatory forces out there with an agenda of domination, we
need to have ways to counter their predatory advances.

Turning everyone in the world into a mini-dictator, is not the answer.

-- 
K.
http://slated.org

.----
| "The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining
| armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos
| neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate
| technology, led them into it in the first place." ~ Douglas Adams
`----

Fedora release 8 (Werewolf) on sky, running kernel 2.6.23.8-63.fc8
 03:13:47 up 207 days, 23:49,  4 users,  load average: 0.80, 0.42, 0.32

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