When did the HN crowd become so defensive of copyright? I understand the concerns on copilot but it’s kinda weirding me out.
So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.
People write and share code because it is useful to do that, not because licenses require them to.
I think FOSS would do fine with no copyright, and in fact more software might end up open source if we had ZERO copyright... why not make your code open source and get back contributions when your code would end up being shared anyway?
Compare this to something like the playstation 4, which used freeBSD as the base of their OS, and contributed nothing back to the project at all.
The only big UNIX vendor left was Sun Microsystems, and Solaris indeed dominated the 90s dotcom era. Everybody was running SPARC and SunOS servers.
It wouldn't be until the mid 2000s when Linux started picking up the pieces left behind after Red Hat started their server product and certification program.
For a long time, Linux was strictly a hobbyist OS. It later dominated by simply being the last one standing after everyone else fell.
And "for a long time" was actually a fairly short time. Linux began to approach feature-comparability fast, and ran on PCs, not $10,000 workstations (that were getting beat power-wise by PCs).
I think there were likely other factors that made it win out.
But I think that's the main one that allowed Linux to snowball ahead of the other Unix(-likes).
The UCBerkeley Computer Science Research Group (if I've got my acronyms right) was one of the recipients and went on to add on many, many features and releasing the result under the BSD license.
Many people built companies like Sun around selling BSD Unix, including many alumni of UCB.
Then AT&T got out from under the consent agreement and began selling its own Unix, System V. By this time, Unix was a major player in the workstation market (a market that has largely disappeared as PCs got more powerful).
By, say, the mid 1980s, there were many, many companies selling many, many varieties of Unix, all descended from the original Unix via BSD or via BSD+System V. Most of them had some unique, valuable features (Irix's graphics, AIX's LVM and journaling file system, etc.) and all of them had modifications to lock customers into their version. This is where the POSIX standards come from (second only to ecmascript market manipulation goofiness), and why things like Autoconf/automake and the much-loved imake (not really) exist. There was much in-fighting; Sun vs everybody else, everybody else vs. IBM, etc.
Then two things happened: PCs got more powerful and began eating into the bottom of the workstation market (PCs ran DOS+Windows, which was and arguably still is, technically inferior to multi-user-by-design systems like Unix[1].) And PCs got more powerful and began to be able to run more advanced OSs (think "memory management").
At this point, the Unix world began to conflict with the Windows world. Unix was technically superior, Windows had more public and developer mind-share. But the Unix world was still more interested in fighting each other and stapled all of their arms and legs to that particular tree.
The end result was that Windows became and remains the most-used operating system[2]. All (almost) of the commercial Unixs died (almost; there's still some animated corpses around)[3]. The two counter-examples are MacOS, which is completely locked to Apple hardware, and Linux.
Linux is the interesting case. Windows and commercial Unix all had a 15- to 20-year head start. But Linux achieved (mostly) feature parity quickly and did not break down into multiple, competing streams. Both of those are due to the GPL; you can fork GPL software all you want, but you cannot add a feature to a fork and expect it not to be back-ported into the original if it's useful. You also have a very hard time locking users into your fork.
The bottom line is that Microsoft won the Unix wars, because the Unix licenses allowed companies to take Unix proprietary.
[1] Modern Windows is kinda-sorta based on VMS, another workstation OS, but not really and then they walked that back, and so on....
[2] I don't really consider Android or iOS to be general-purpose OSs. And they're both rather their own little islands, no matter how much the underlying tech shares with the rest of the universe.
[3] The Free/Net/Open/DragonFly BSDs are, I'm sorry to say, noise. And did you notice that I had to mention four of them?
projects like openwrt would not exist if it weren't for copyright enforcement.
I am positing that if licenses didn't exist, and anyone could do anything they want with any bit of code they see, open source would still prosper.
I am not saying this is the way we want to go, I am just curious about the thought experiment.
Copyright is good in limited quantities. The current multi-decade time horizon is probably what a lot of people are against, and not the concept in general.
And limited time period seems to be consistent through history. From the paper "Copyrights and Creativity: Evidence from Italian Opera in the Napoleonic Age":
> Comparing changes in the creation of new operas across Italian states with and without copyrights, we show that the adoption of basic copyrights encouraged the creation of new work. Moreover, we find that copyrights changed the quality of creative output by encouraging composers to produce more popular and durable works. These results generalize to a broader set of musical compositions and to librettos, as the literary component to the score of operas. Based on these findings, we conclude that the adoption of basic levels of copyright protection – not exceeding the lifetime of the composer – can help to raise both the quantity and the quality of new creative works.
> Importantly, we find that extensions in the length of copyright beyond the composer’s life did not encourage creativity. Performance data reveal that few operas were played after the first 20 years, which suggests that only the most durable creative goods stand to gain from copyright extensions. […]
* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2505776
I don't mind that copyright exists, I just wish it was better.
Also there's a power difference between individuals violating the rights of a big company, and a big company violating the rights of many individuals.
If Copilot isn't reined in, it feels like yet another case of "The laws only apply to poor people".
Copyright is a horrible system. Microsoft has been one of the biggest proponents of that system. But now they've clearly violated it. They should either join in abolishing it, or face its consequences.
Personally I would be concerned about insert corp here accidentally stealing code from an open source project then years later going after the open source project for copyright infringement regarding the code they in fact stole from the open source project.
Especially if you remember the phrase "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".
If you agree with libgen and scihub then you should definitely not see anything wrong with copilot, because what copilot is doing is considerably milder, they are not reproducing anybody's works.
If you disagree with libgen and scihub because they are illegal only then can the argument that copilot is infringing be made.
Yes, if those were the only two things being discussed, it would be.
But almost all of these people think a certain amount of copyright for songs and movies is good too. And I bet a vast majority of them support copyright for books too, or at least most books.