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> Copyleft literally can't exist without copyright A miracle cancer cure literally can't exist without cancer. Exactly! That's the point. Copyleft is a tempora

by breck 5y ago

> Copyleft literally can't exist without copyright A miracle cancer cure literally can't exist without cancer. Exactly! That's the point. Copyleft is a temporary treatment for the cancer of copyright. When we get rid of the tumors, we don't need (or want it) anymore. The free market can solve the NDA problem. Our tax dollars should be used for more important problems than deciding whether adults are keeping secrets between each other.

kube-system 5y ago
> The free market can solve the NDA problem. Under what mechanism? The free market didn’t share code with the world pre-GPL and other copyleft licenses. What reason would they have to continue to comply? Large companies are not contributing to copyleft projects for fun, altruism, or profit. They’re doing it because the software is good and they legally must contribute in order to extract profit from it. If you take away that obligation, they’re not going to instruct their employees to waste company time making a pull request that is no longer legally required. They’ll have their 9-to-5 engineers push fixes to their own proprietary forks which you’ll have to pay for, and hobbyist forks will be stuck with whatever hobbyists fix in their spare time.
- breck 5y ago
  In a world without copyright employees can leave at will and continue to use all the code they wrote.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Not if they sign NDAs, which is exactly what many companies require employees to do now, and what even more will do if copyright doesn’t exist.
    - breck 5y ago
      The government should not be in the business of policing NDAs. NDAs will go the same way as non competes in California.
      - kube-system 5y ago
        There’s no way this would realistically happen. Business and government rely highly on NDAs to do business. NDAs are the legal/contractual resolution mechanism that resolves disputes when business partners backstab each other. If you remove that mechanism, the problem will still exist, it’ll simply get filled with another resolution mechanism. Maybe a return to mob rule?
        breck 5y ago
        > Business and government rely highly on NDAs to do business. And there's no reason for this other than to preserve power in the hands of the powerful. The sole purpose of the NDA is to limit the rights of the party with less capital and create unnatural advantages to the holders of capital. They eventually cause great social harm, and society ultimately pays the price cleaning up the mess. How many hundreds of billions of dollars in security costs does our society keep having to pay because of Microsoft and Intels reliance on NDAs and copyrights which led to building much of the digital world on shaky foundations. Like technical debt, there is "secrecy debt". Too much leads to catastrophe. People should have the right privacy and to keep secrets. But our collective government should not be in the business of subsidizing that.

by breck 5y ago

kube-system 5y ago

> The free market can solve the NDA problem. Under what mechanism? The free market didn’t share code with the world pre-GPL and other copyleft licenses. What reason would they have to continue to comply? Large companies are not contributing to copyleft projects for fun, altruism, or profit. They’re doing it because the software is good and they legally must contribute in order to extract profit from it. If you take away that obligation, they’re not going to instruct their employees to waste company time making a pull request that is no longer legally required. They’ll have their 9-to-5 engineers push fixes to their own proprietary forks which you’ll have to pay for, and hobbyist forks will be stuck with whatever hobbyists fix in their spare time.

breck 5y ago
In a world without copyright employees can leave at will and continue to use all the code they wrote.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Not if they sign NDAs, which is exactly what many companies require employees to do now, and what even more will do if copyright doesn’t exist.
  - breck 5y ago
    The government should not be in the business of policing NDAs. NDAs will go the same way as non competes in California.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      There’s no way this would realistically happen. Business and government rely highly on NDAs to do business. NDAs are the legal/contractual resolution mechanism that resolves disputes when business partners backstab each other. If you remove that mechanism, the problem will still exist, it’ll simply get filled with another resolution mechanism. Maybe a return to mob rule?
      - breck 5y ago
        > Business and government rely highly on NDAs to do business. And there's no reason for this other than to preserve power in the hands of the powerful. The sole purpose of the NDA is to limit the rights of the party with less capital and create unnatural advantages to the holders of capital. They eventually cause great social harm, and society ultimately pays the price cleaning up the mess. How many hundreds of billions of dollars in security costs does our society keep having to pay because of Microsoft and Intels reliance on NDAs and copyrights which led to building much of the digital world on shaky foundations. Like technical debt, there is "secrecy debt". Too much leads to catastrophe. People should have the right privacy and to keep secrets. But our collective government should not be in the business of subsidizing that.