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> Ultimately copyleft is mostly a bureaucratic exercise Exactly, it is a hack that weaponizes the very system of software copyright against iself. Companies wa

> Ultimately copyleft is mostly a bureaucratic exercise Exactly, it is a hack that weaponizes the very system of software copyright against iself. Companies want the power to restrict everyone except license payers to use their software? Fine, then we can restrict their right to restrict our rights. I think any criticism of copyleft should also contain the exact same criticism od copyright itself. Especially since it's copyright that started stifling collaboration in the first place... Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist.

JohnFen 3y ago
> Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist. Take it from a graybeard, this is absolutely not true. "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1. Early on, it didn't really affect things too much, but most software was under copyright.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1 What exactly do you mean by "day 1"? First algorithm written? First computer program written? First program shared between machines? I remember reading Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in. I am not familiar with exact history of US software copyright, so if you have any hard info about that, I'd be happy to read it, and correct any of my future statements on the topic.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Well, "day 1" was an exaggeration, since the first program was arguably written in 1843. And it's not exactly clear when the first commercial computer was put on the market (it depends on how you count). But, looking back on the earliest times that I was involved with computers -- which predates microcomputers entirely -- all of the software that came with the machines was copyrighted, as evidenced by the copious amount of copyright notices all over everything. > Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in. Taken literally, Richard Stallman is simply wrong here. But I doubt that he meant that all software was free of copyright (simply because it wasn't). In the US, before 1978(?), you had to register your copyright and it was legally possible to intentionally not copyright works. Lots of software did that, so there was certainly software that wasn't under copyright. I suspect that's what Stallman was talking about. The need to file to obtain copyright protection does mean that copyright didn't apply "by default" then. But that's not saying that there wasn't copyrighted software! There's no such thing as "software copyright", by the way. It's just "copyright", and software doesn't have any sort of special status now, nor did it then. As to hard info regarding the history of US copyright, there's tons of it available online. You could do worse than reading the various histories and issues the government has at www.copyright.gov.
simiones 3y ago
As someone else is pointing out, software has always been copyright protectable, and there has always existed software which took advantage of those protections, so that part is surely false. The way I see it, there are two positions on software, both valid: 1. You want to develop a piece of software for your own sake, and potentially sell it to others. You copyright it and keep it proprietary. 2. You want to develop a piece of software in collaboration with other people. You apply an open source license to it. My point about copyleft adding unnecessary bureaucracy to collaboration only applies to case 2. In case 1, you don't want that collaboration, and the copyright system helps you achieve that. I should also note that if the copyright system didn't exist, most software would still not respect the 4 freedoms. Code would still be kept secret by companies (and employees would be contractually prevented from leaking it), and they would still impose hardware + software restrictions on which software you could install on hardware they sell. Even worse, they could actually do this with Linux or GNU utils as well. The GPL isn't hacking the copyright system against itself, to "disable it" for software. It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright. And if it weren't for software copyright, we wouldn't need that protection at all! In a software-copyright-less world, reverse engineering wouldn't be a copyright violation, so the scenarios you mention would be very unlikely to happen.
  - simiones 3y ago
    Reverse engineering is already legal and is very explicitly not a copyright violation - that's why we have open source Unix today. You may be thinking of decompilation, but that can be defeated (at least partly) with various techniques. Not to mention, with so much software moving to SaaS models, access to even the binaries to be able to do reverse engineer them is going to be extremely hard. Also, embedded devices using GNU utils and Linux would have no reason to allow any access to the code running on them in a world without copyright.

JohnFen 3y ago

> Originally, all software was "free software", since the concept of software copyright didn't even exist. Take it from a graybeard, this is absolutely not true. "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1. Early on, it didn't really affect things too much, but most software was under copyright.

bheadmaster 3y ago
> "Software copyright" has always been a thing, from day 1 What exactly do you mean by "day 1"? First algorithm written? First computer program written? First program shared between machines? I remember reading Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in. I am not familiar with exact history of US software copyright, so if you have any hard info about that, I'd be happy to read it, and correct any of my future statements on the topic.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Well, "day 1" was an exaggeration, since the first program was arguably written in 1843. And it's not exactly clear when the first commercial computer was put on the market (it depends on how you count). But, looking back on the earliest times that I was involved with computers -- which predates microcomputers entirely -- all of the software that came with the machines was copyrighted, as evidenced by the copious amount of copyright notices all over everything. > Richard Stallman's story about software sharing, and him explicitly saying how software was initially free "by default", and how it was companies that invented software copyright, which is the spirit my original comment was intended in. Taken literally, Richard Stallman is simply wrong here. But I doubt that he meant that all software was free of copyright (simply because it wasn't). In the US, before 1978(?), you had to register your copyright and it was legally possible to intentionally not copyright works. Lots of software did that, so there was certainly software that wasn't under copyright. I suspect that's what Stallman was talking about. The need to file to obtain copyright protection does mean that copyright didn't apply "by default" then. But that's not saying that there wasn't copyrighted software! There's no such thing as "software copyright", by the way. It's just "copyright", and software doesn't have any sort of special status now, nor did it then. As to hard info regarding the history of US copyright, there's tons of it available online. You could do worse than reading the various histories and issues the government has at www.copyright.gov.

simiones 3y ago

As someone else is pointing out, software has always been copyright protectable, and there has always existed software which took advantage of those protections, so that part is surely false. The way I see it, there are two positions on software, both valid: 1. You want to develop a piece of software for your own sake, and potentially sell it to others. You copyright it and keep it proprietary. 2. You want to develop a piece of software in collaboration with other people. You apply an open source license to it. My point about copyleft adding unnecessary bureaucracy to collaboration only applies to case 2. In case 1, you don't want that collaboration, and the copyright system helps you achieve that. I should also note that if the copyright system didn't exist, most software would still not respect the 4 freedoms. Code would still be kept secret by companies (and employees would be contractually prevented from leaking it), and they would still impose hardware + software restrictions on which software you could install on hardware they sell. Even worse, they could actually do this with Linux or GNU utils as well. The GPL isn't hacking the copyright system against itself, to "disable it" for software. It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright.

bheadmaster 3y ago
> It's hacking the copyright system to extend protections that would not be possible in a world without copyright. And if it weren't for software copyright, we wouldn't need that protection at all! In a software-copyright-less world, reverse engineering wouldn't be a copyright violation, so the scenarios you mention would be very unlikely to happen.
- simiones 3y ago
  Reverse engineering is already legal and is very explicitly not a copyright violation - that's why we have open source Unix today. You may be thinking of decompilation, but that can be defeated (at least partly) with various techniques. Not to mention, with so much software moving to SaaS models, access to even the binaries to be able to do reverse engineer them is going to be extremely hard. Also, embedded devices using GNU utils and Linux would have no reason to allow any access to the code running on them in a world without copyright.