3 ms·
As someone else is pointing out, software has always been copyright protectable, and there has always existed software which took advantage of those protections
by 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 agoReverse 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.
- bheadmaster 3y ago> Reverse engineering is already legal and is very explicitly not a copyright violation So you're saying I can reverse engineer Windows software, and use the results in my own product, without Microsoft raining hell on me? Wow, those ReactOS guys are really dumb with their clean-room reimplementation then! Someone send them a fax!