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Comment by zeveb | Hacker News Reader

> You can't have markets if you can't have transactions, and you can't have transactions in software if you don't have copyright protection.

I'm not convinced that copyrighted software is, indeed, a good thing. The FSF's philosophical documents are pretty persuasive.

> The world benefits enormously from just being able to sell software, movies, etc. as you would a physical product.

Does it though? I've found that the best, most pleasant, most powerful, most flexible software I use is free.

> It's one where you can only watch movies in theaters, or stream them onto locked down devices like Apple TVs instead of general purpose computers.

Try streaming movies on FreeBSD, Linux desktops or anything which is not macOS, iOS, Windows or Android!

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> The FSF's philosophical documents are pretty persuasive.

The GPL, at the core of the FSF mission, explicitly and deliberately relies on copyright law for its legal effects.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.en....

The FSF is not opposed to copyright as a concept. You can argue over duration, but copyleft would not be possible if everything were in the public domain.

> The FSF is not opposed to copyright as a concept. You can argue over duration, but copyleft would not be possible if everything were in the public domain.

Without copyright, arguably copyleft would be unnecessary, since the whole purpose of copyleft is to prevent non-Free code from being built on Free code, and without copyright, everything would be Free.

(OTOH, given the GPLv3, maybe that's not correct in the FSFs view, since the GPLv3 implies that "Free" has a broader and industry-dependent definition that merely eliminating copyright-based limitations wouldn't satisfy, so maybe the FSF does need to be copyright maximalists to advance their idea of Freedom-compelled-by-copyleft-license.)

GPLv3 mainly added new clauses to deal with other "intellectual property" laws that people started using to "protect" their source code such as patents, TIVO-ization tricks, and DRM. GPLv2 was written back when copyright was the only thing people were using to prevent sharing of their code.

> without copyright, everything would be Free

Or no commercial entity would publish source.

But there would be no basis for outlawing reverse engineering either.

Reverse engineering isn't outlawed.

> The FSF is not opposed to copyright as a concept.

I'm not sure you're knowledgeable enough on the subject to make that claim.

> You can argue over duration, but copyleft would not be possible if everything were in the public domain.

Copyleft wouldn't be necessary if everything were in the public domain.

> Copyleft wouldn't be necessary if everything were in the public domain.

If everything were in the public domain, nothing would stop you from forking an open-source project and distributing only binaries of your modifications. The precise difference between the GPL and say the MIT/BSD licenses is that the GPL precludes that. Copyright is the only hook you can use to compel creators of derivative works to distribute user-readable source.

That's true, but for sufficiently large organizations, it would only be a matter of time before the code associated with the binaries was leaked, and without copyright, you would simply be able to use that leaked code.

Under MIT/BSD you can't, for example, use and distribute the changes to the Mac OS source code which were made after they forked from BSD.

There's still a bit of difference between GPL and just having everything public domain, I agree, but the difference isn't nearly as important as you're thinking it is.

Working within the copyright system that exists and affects us all should not be misinterpreted as agreeing with copyright.

Copyrighting software is terrible for society. But given that copyrighting software exists and can't easily be gotten rid of, what can we do to minimize the damage and keep software free (as in freedom)? I think the GPL is a good answer to that question.

This is silly. The software FSF is most opposed to is protected not as much by copyright as by simple trade secrecy. It's not from honoring copyrights that DRM systems derive their power; that would be tautological, since the point of DRM systems is to thwart people who ignore copyright.

In a world without copyright, large corporations would have free rein to slurp up all the world's public software, extend it however they like, create whatever remaining functionality they needed, and publish none of it. None of what the GPL's copyleft attempts to accomplish would be possible.

> In a world without copyright, large corporations would have free rein to slurp up all the world's public software, extend it however they like, create whatever remaining functionality they needed, and publish none of it. None of what the GPL's copyleft attempts to accomplish would be possible.

That's only true of a world without copyright where no other system of rules around software existed. It's trivial to propose a set of rules that requires code sharing without copyright. In fact, such a set of rules would probably be much simpler than the GPL. Copyleft is really a convoluted hack on top of copyright.

That's only one way to get there. Product regulations could require that source code be available in all cases, separate from any copyright or licensing factors.

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