I would abolish copyright as well as patents (all copyright and patents, not only software patents). Someone might publish something or keep it a secret, but th

I would abolish copyright as well as patents (all copyright and patents, not only software patents). Someone might publish something or keep it a secret, but that shouldn't stop anyone else from doing it independently, either by themself or by reverse engineering an existing work. I had the idea of a license (not yet written) which allows free use like it is in the public domain, and cannot be sued/arrested for copyright violation or for anti-circumvention or other things like that, and no attribution or copyright notice is required, but derivative works etc must be licensed by either the same license or GNU GPL 3 or GNU AGPL 3 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 (only) or later versions of GNU GPL or AGPL. These rights will then apply to patents as well as copyrights (so you can't patent a derivative work either). Someone can claim otherwise but then their claim is invalid, and only in this circumstance can you countersue. It is supposed to be effectively the same if the copyright and patent laws were abolished; if those laws are abolished the only difference is that relicensing them by the other license will not be possible, but the other rights are supposed to be the same. (The reason the limited relicensing is allowed is to be practical.) Abolishing software patents may be a good start, though. Another alternative would be the law to be made unenforceable against FOSS (although there are probably too many difficulties in doing this properly). However, this would not be as good as just abolishing patents entirely. When patents are used, they have the effect of making innovation twenty years behind. When used incorrectly, they are even worse.