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Would Linux have succeeded to the extent it has without copyright? Its licensing model depends heavily on copyright law.

diffeomorphism 6y ago
I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms: 0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms. The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".
- coldpie 6y ago
  No, the GPL depends on copyright to function. Otherwise it degenerates into a BSD-family license (actually not even that, as you wouldn't have to give credit to the original author). GPL requires you to provide the source of binary software you ship to your users by revoking your copyright grant if you do not do that. If you remove the threat of copyright enforcement, then I can ship your GPL library without shipping source.
  - gpm 6y ago
    A bsd family licence allows the next programmer to add on new legal restrictions (e.g. no modifying the binary, no distributing the modified binary, no reverse engineering the binary, ...). In a world with no copyright the source code requirement dies, but all the remaining freedoms stay intact. Reverse engineering and decompilers become much more important.
- pgcj_poster 6y ago
  Copyright isn't the only thing that can keep people from having those freedoms -- even without copyright a developer could choose not to distribute the source code. It seems likely that less proprietary software would exist without copyright, though.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
vaccinator 6y ago
You cant be serious...
incompatible 6y ago
Who can say for sure what would have happened if Linus had used an MIT-style license instead. Linux would not necessarily have failed. But if, for example, a proprietary version had become dominant, that would have been enabled by copyright law. It's not the existence of copyright law that allows Linux to succeed as an open-source project.

diffeomorphism 6y ago

I guess the argument is that "copyleft" is not needed without "copyright". In particular, look at the four freedoms: 0) free to run the program as you wish, for any purpose 1) The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. 2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others. 3) The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. The only thing taking away these freedoms is copyright and public domain software gives you all these freedoms. The only caveat is with 1) in that one could use digital restrictions management to make this harder. However, there is a difference between "circumventing DRM is difficult" and "circumventing DRM is illegal".

coldpie 6y ago
No, the GPL depends on copyright to function. Otherwise it degenerates into a BSD-family license (actually not even that, as you wouldn't have to give credit to the original author). GPL requires you to provide the source of binary software you ship to your users by revoking your copyright grant if you do not do that. If you remove the threat of copyright enforcement, then I can ship your GPL library without shipping source.
- gpm 6y ago
  A bsd family licence allows the next programmer to add on new legal restrictions (e.g. no modifying the binary, no distributing the modified binary, no reverse engineering the binary, ...). In a world with no copyright the source code requirement dies, but all the remaining freedoms stay intact. Reverse engineering and decompilers become much more important.
pgcj_poster 6y ago
Copyright isn't the only thing that can keep people from having those freedoms -- even without copyright a developer could choose not to distribute the source code. It seems likely that less proprietary software would exist without copyright, though.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

vaccinator 6y ago

You cant be serious...

incompatible 6y ago

Who can say for sure what would have happened if Linus had used an MIT-style license instead. Linux would not necessarily have failed. But if, for example, a proprietary version had become dominant, that would have been enabled by copyright law. It's not the existence of copyright law that allows Linux to succeed as an open-source project.