5 ms·
Assuming that someone has saved the source, you'd have to track them down. If it was work for hire, like say at a fruit company, that person probably doesn't ha
by KerrAvon 4y ago
Assuming that someone has saved the source, you'd have to track them down. If it was work for hire, like say at a fruit company, that person probably doesn't have the rights to it. So you have to go to the lawyers. The fruit company lawyers might not actually be able to verify that the fruit company owns it, but if they want to try, it will require some effort to find the documentation, which will be somewhere in dead tree-based archives from the 1980's if it exists at all.
Which is to say that if you can identify the rights holder and it's not an individual, you have to convince them to spend time and money to release the rights. That they may not be able to easily confirm they have.
Or you could grab the binary and disassemble it and figure out what it's doing yourself.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoI think we all know all of that. I think the point of the remark is specifically to step back from those obvious givens and observe an essential absurdity.
- SllX 4y agoIt’s not that absurd that people conserve their actions, time and money and a different group of people spend their own time and money on understanding something that they value differently than the people who originated the software. You could impose obligations on people to release more than they do, but that will just change the calculus on what they choose to work on and release at all because now other people want to spend their time for them. This is just an inconvenience.
- Brian_K_White 4y agoWhat? This is some weird overblown reaction. The absurdity is only a small one and does not imply any kind of suggestion about imposing obligations or anything like that. Again, the details of how the situation came to be are not any mystery. The end result, forget the chain of reasonable steps to get there, is in a sense silly, or perhaps remarkable, in the literal sense of simply "bears remarking", that one person is studying something like an archeologist assembling guesses and deductions from incomplete clues, while another person exists somewhere in the world who is physically alive and posesses the the answers natively that the other is guessing at. No one said that it was a crime that demands action, and no one said anyone's individual actions, either the original developers or the "archeologists", are absurd.
- SllX 4y agoWe’re largely in agreement, but I think words like “absurd” are too strong in an Internet forum no matter how slightly it was intended because it doesn’t travel well. I also wanted to preemptively explore a possibility; that wasn’t to suggest it was something you said (you didn’t) or something I was advocating for (I’m not), just to flesh out the discussion here for future readers of this forum by offering up another perspective. I just don’t think there’s a good universal fix for this whether it’s an essential absurdity or an inconvenience, but as you can see in the other responses to me, some reading this will take what you or I said in a different and entirely predictable direction. I just want people reading you, before they get to the “what can we do to resolve this situation?” phase to think through the implications and knock-on effects of trying to address it at all and the manner in which they do so. Cheers!
- prmoustache 4y agoOr you could make proprietary software illegal.
- rbanffy 4y agoI like the way you think.