Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : David Golden
Date : Thu Aug 25 2005 02:34 am

Copyright and patent monopoly laws represent gross interference in the
software market, apart from the civil liberty concerns.  Of course,
maybe you're not a free-market capitalist, so you might not care -
maybe you prefer command capitalism ?!

A free market in software, in writing new and updating or otherwise
customising old software - gee, stuff programmers do - is the aim for
many FSF-supporting programmers.  "Without copyright law the GPL would
be unenforceable. It would also be unnecessary". 

Software in the abstract is nonrivalrous - if I give you a copy of some
software, I still have my copy. If I give you a table,  I'm down one
table.  So the naturally scarce item in a free software market is
programmer labour, not software. Good programmers will be in  demand
for quite some time to come, even when we have abolished copyright and
patent law - if anything we'll  be better off, and we won't have so
many parasitic middlemen. Right now, the richest people in software
aren't programmers, they're the middlemen who have been handed 
distribution monopolies on a plate by the state - would microsoft
have become such an antitrust problem if they weren't handed ready-made
copyright and patent monopolies in the first place? I doubt it.

I'm quite happy for closed and open source software to compete in a free
software market, where the production, redistribution and modification
of physical copies of binaries or source by the purchaser of a physical
copy of software is allowed.

Note that I would probably hold that claiming to be the author of a
program you didn't write would still be fraudulent - you don't need
copyright law's restrictions on redistribution of information for
plagiarism to be an offence... I should be free to pass on a copy of
some software with "here's a program Jim wrote" or "here's a program
Jim wrote with some modifications by me", but not to say "here's a
program I wrote" if Jim wrote it... 

Perhaps there may also be markets for offering
warranty/assumption-of-risk for use of some software, and a programmer
might offer warranty for the correctness of his work... IIRC (note the
IIRC, I'm too lazy to go reread the GPL right now, might be thinking of
one or more of the other open source licenses) even the current GPL
doesn't prohibit offering additional warranties to people by
independent written agreement.

Discretionary provision of commercial warranties is AFAIK already used
as a business model for some free software.  One of the underhanded
tactics of those with a hatred of libre software (probably because it
threatens their cushy state-aided (by copyright law) closed software 
corporate-welfare status quo) is to try to tie warranty provision to
provision of copies of software.  This would open up libre software to
attack from any goon who downloads the software, independent of whether
said goon has actually paid for a warranty or not.

Software is just a set of instructions for a machine to follow, and if
you instruct *your own machine* to follow some random instructions you
found for free on the internet, why should it be anybody else's problem
but your own, at least if you haven't paid for it to be someone else's
problem? - particularly when the instructions have, often written in
all caps, words to the effect of "YOU AND YOUR MACHINES FOLLOW THESE
INSTRUCTIONS TOTALLY AT YOUR OWN RISK, OH AND YOU'RE A REAL FOOL IF YOU
RUN A NUCLEAR PLANT WITH THIS" up-front and plain to see?

.