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> The FSF is not opposed to copyright as a concept. I'm not sure you're knowledgeable enough on the subject to make that claim. > You can argue over duration,
by devishard 10y ago
> The FSF is not opposed to copyright as a concept.
I'm not sure you're knowledgeable enough on the subject to make that claim.
> You can argue over duration, but copyleft would not be possible if everything were in the public domain.
Copyleft wouldn't be necessary if everything were in the public domain.
- rayiner 10y ago> Copyleft wouldn't be necessary if everything were in the public domain. If everything were in the public domain, nothing would stop you from forking an open-source project and distributing only binaries of your modifications. The precise difference between the GPL and say the MIT/BSD licenses is that the GPL precludes that. Copyright is the only hook you can use to compel creators of derivative works to distribute user-readable source.
- devishard 10y agoThat's true, but for sufficiently large organizations, it would only be a matter of time before the code associated with the binaries was leaked, and without copyright, you would simply be able to use that leaked code. Under MIT/BSD you can't, for example, use and distribute the changes to the Mac OS source code which were made after they forked from BSD. There's still a bit of difference between GPL and just having everything public domain, I agree, but the difference isn't nearly as important as you're thinking it is.