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Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that wo
by Asbostos 11y ago
Good point about GPL. Some people advocate for much shorter copyright terms, just enough to make it worthwhile creating the work, like say 20 years. But that would push some GPL software into the public domain, thus damaging the GPL ecosystem by allowing commercial competitors to use the same code.
- usrusr 11y agoPardon me if I have trouble seeing a terrible loss for the GNU ecosystem if releases from 1995 were transferred to the public domain.
- Asbostos 11y agoThere are some very old but hard-to-do-yourself things like compilers, early versions of Linux, etc. Sure it won't be massive, but in the long term it'd slow the ever-growing collection of GPL work, as the old stuff leaks out the back end.
- belorn 11y agoWe are talking about works which then has had no patches for 20 years. Even compiles of dead languages do get minor patches over time, if nothing else then to fix memory leaks, crashes, infinitive loops and compatibility with new os kernels. You would for example have to enable low memory address exception in the kernel to run many 20 year old programs, since many programs back then assumed they would start at address space zero, which modern kernel forbids for security reasons.