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From my understanding the GPL was created as a hack on copyright law in order to prevent abuses. Without copyright laws the GPL wouldn't have been needed in the
by ben-schaaf 4y ago
From my understanding the GPL was created as a hack on copyright law in order to prevent abuses. Without copyright laws the GPL wouldn't have been needed in the first place. See https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/ https://www.free-soft.org/gpl_history/
- simiones 4y ago> Without copyright laws the GPL wouldn't have been needed in the first place. That's an inaccurate understanding, and is not supported by that history page, or by more recent actions from the FSF and Richard Stallman. Without copyright, there would be no copyleft - which would mean that companies would be entirely free to take any libre software, package it with their own user-hostile changes, and bundle it in an obfuscated binary. They would also be free to do what TiVo did, and add hardware constraints to prevent you from running modified versions of "their" software, even if "their" software is GNU utilities. The framework of copyright is actually quite important for the free software movement to be able to enforce its goals and try to force companies to contribute to free software.
- ben-schaaf 4y agoIndeed the GPL is stronger due to copyright than if neither existed, but without it you'd still be within your rights to redistribute and modify the binary. Because of the ineffectiveness of obfuscation I don't see how businesses would have an incentive to keep source code private anymore.