5 ms·

why bother having copyrights at all?

• miloignis 4y ago
  Again, I'm not saying Microsoft is right - I think they're wrong - but Open Source would do just fine without any copyrights. Indeed, some great open source software is fully in the public domain (SQLite, for instance!) with all copyright explicitly waived. The lack of copyright doesn't affect me using SQLite at all, and I am very grateful for its existence. I generally license my code under very permissive licenses, and would go full public-domain myself if not for worry about it being ineffective in different jurisdictions, also wanting to give patent licenses, etc.
  • w4ffl35 4y ago
    I take your point - NASA's github code is public domain for example. But we still need to respect existing copyrights and its very disheartening (but not unexpected) to see Microsoft and Github fail in that regard
• b3morales 4y ago
  Source code copyrights are the foundation that open-source licenses stand on, in the legal reality we occupy. In other worlds, there are probably better alternatives. But if Microsoft and GitHub would object to their own copyrighted code being used to train "FSFpilot" (and I would bet they would) then they can't use my code for their project either, not without following the license under which I gave them access to it.
  • w4ffl35 4y ago
    exactly