Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again)
To   : comp.programming
From : Scott Moore
Date : Thu Aug 25 2005 12:50 am

David Golden wrote:
> 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 ?!

"markets" are based on ownership, so that is the use of a capitalist
term without understanding its meaning, sorry.

> 
> 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.

You have all of those things you desire. You can make software, distribute
it, have others modify it, all of that, all of the things you claim to
want, that is open source, that is freeware.

However, you then proceed to avocate that the right to produce paid software
be removed, by force of law, from others.

No one here has a problem with open source. No one here has a problem with
freeware. We all respect the use of the GPL.

However, you aren't avocating that. You are avocating abolishment, by force
of law, of my means to make a living.

I have a problem with that. And the law is on my side. You could just be
happy and go make your software and distribute that. The fact that me, and
what I do is intolerable to you is a problem that exists only in your
mind.

-- 
Samiam is Scott A. Moore

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Good does not always win. But good is more patient.

.