Comment by Eliah_Lakhin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Eliah_Lakhin | Hacker News Reader

Informally speaking, the idea of the free software movement and the copyleft specifically was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment that in its ultimate goal wants to have a full control over the software and independent individual creators who just want to be free in creativity and are fine to share their work with anyone who also follows these principals in some way.

The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws. While I agree that the law is not ideal, to my vision the Berne Convention foundations are on the individual creators side. Fighting against Copyright, in my opinion, is a shooting yourself in the foot.

I'm not a big fan of the FSF and other similar movements rhetoric because of this(even though, I agree with some points). If creators just want to share their work with other people, and they don't care about the business "plutocracy", they can offer a License contract that would simply restrict the work usage by individuals only. It could still be a free of charge License that would allow even commercial use of the work, but the License should grant permissions to individuals only who are not representing a 3rd party interests(a business in particular). Such License is not a FOSS License in common sense, but in my opinion it could solve the initial goals laying behind the FOSS movements true intentions.

> the idea of the free software movement (...) was born as a response to fundamental conflict between a business environment (...) and independent individual creators

This is a skewed and very narrow view. The main contrast is not between "businesses" and "individual creators", but between people who control and people who use software. For example, between governments that hire programmers to write software, and citizens that get to use this software. The idea of the free software movement is that users of any software should have the right to know exactly what the software does, and to change it as they see fit. This has really nothing to do with business.

> The members of the movement are also quite often criticizing Copyright laws.

Do you have a reference for that? My impression is that the FSF is quite respectful of copyright laws, and acknowledges their importance. This is an orthogonal issue to that of software freedom.

Thank you for your comment, Enriquto!

> Do you have a reference for that?

I didn't talk just about FSF, but about the free software movement in general. Of course individual members may have different points of view.

For reference example. In the chapter "On Copyleft Maximalism and Unilateral Capitulation" of the first Article in the Thread's link:

"""

Draconian copyright law generally horrifies software freedom activists for good reason. Nearly all copyleft activists would prefer a true, multilateral rewriting of copyright rules that prioritized the interest of the general public and software rights. Copyleft exists primarily because of the long-standing political non-viability of a copyright law reboot. Nothing has changed in this regard; if anything, changing legislation has become an even more expensive lobbying proposition than it was at copyleft’s advent. Copyleft activists should expect, indefinitely, for proprietary software companies and media oligarchs to control copyright legislation.

"""

Source: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/if-software-is-my-copi...

This does not seem to criticize copyright law as much as people who abuse copyright for nefarious purposes. If anything, it vouches for a reform of copyright rules to clarify the situation, not for their demise! And in no way anybody is "fighting against copyright". After all, copyleft itself is implemented using copyright, so it wouldn't make any sense (and I agree with you that it would be obviously shooting oneself in the foot). Also, FSF and other major actors always sign their writings with an explicit copyright notice.

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