(1) copyright as the IP protection for software, with cleaned up laws and procedures about "insignificant changes" and "derivative works" -- or --
(2) the current patent aystem, post CLS Bank, which has eliminated a lot of business method patents and some, but not all, software patents.
I'd go with this. But ideally with a 10-20 year limit on copyright[1].
I do think that there are some software patents (RSA, for example) that seem worthwhile. But the system as a whole seems like it does more harm than good.
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1. My ideal proposal for copyright is exponentially increasing fees (after a short initial grace period) for a linearly increasing time period. But that seems like several bridges too far.
they're every 4 years, though.
please note that whatever a lawyer says about copyright law now is usually limited to what the courts have said plus the latest statutes and what judges are likely to rule.
The topic for today is harder: it's what should copyright law for software say? We're assuming that Congress does its job for once. The lawyers will never do it.
Don't like it that Disney had a forever copyright on Mickey Mouse? Me neither, but that's because copyright law is one-size-fits-all. The proposal is a carve-out where software law is different than literary.
So property taxes or shorter terms are definitely on point. "Which Unix is better" is not.
Which one I'd pick depends a whole lot on what those "cleaned up" laws consist of. But generally, this looks like an exercise in determining which is the lesser evil.
Given the legal frameworks we have available, copyright is the right direction, IMO. Patents seem entirely inappropriate.
But US copyright law is a royal mess and is not really a great tool. It needs to be reformed -- but as the last copyright reform demonstrated, not all reform is an improvement, so my position is that ultimately where I'd fall between those two choices depends on what, exactly, copyright laws look like.
However, absent copyright, it would probably be impossible (IANAL but have talked to lawyers about these topics) to enforce any usage provisions on open source software where you haven't explicitly agreed to a license. (Open source licenses basically give you rights that you wouldn't otherwise have under copyright law.)
In other words, all options are on the table. We're assuming that Congress does its job, for once, and being that they're politicians, they do sometimes respond to public pressure.
Congress passed the Sonny Bono Disney Protection Act (being facetious here). Was that before the Convention was signed?
There is apparently some flexibility within the Berne Convention on copyright terms. There are also limitations on public domain works in continental Europe that differ from common law countries like the US. However, it does govern copyright in broad strokes. For example, the US used to require that a creator explicitly assert copyright while most of the rest of the world did not.
In any case, the US is generally aligned with copyright in most of the rest of the world. So any broad change in copyright law (other than perhaps somewhat shortening terms) would make it an outlier.
If one defines UNIX as POSIX, then, for the most part, or at least a pretty good part, Linux IS UNIX, because Linux implements much of POSIX, and in some cases does it better, e.g., certain functions for which POSIX is quiet or negative about thread safety are thread-safe on Linux, and there are almost always TS versions, e.g., strtok_r.
Outside of POSIX, one has to conside OS specific features, two of which come to mind as superior, though this is a judgement call: Solaris Zones and Mac OS.
I was a Linux desktop user for years, but I found that over time the desktop just started getting in my way (this was tennish years ago, so I am sure things have changed). I’d curse how gnome or KDE had once again broken my UX, then I’d help my wife or daughter with their Macs, enjoy the experience, the curse when I got back to my machine.
One day, after a particularly frustrating battle with whatever desktop I had then (I’d gone from Ubuntu to Mint to Debian to I cannot remember what, trying to find the sweet spot), I cursed, yelled that I would be back in 90 minutes, and bought my first Mac.
They’ve been a joy to use since. If Apple does something stupid, e.g., stopping at an old, brain dead bash, well, homebrew, et al, to the rescue.
Solaris Zones were wicked. One could get full MAC with labelled networking and restricted root with ease.
It’s finally possible to get close to Zones with a mix of capability management, namespace management, SELinux, et al, but not as easily.
So, yeah, there are individual UNIXisms that are better than Linux, but overall, at least on the server side, Linux is UNIX improved.
XFCE is one of my own fallbacks (I usually prefer WindowMaker), though fvwm, twm(!), the boxes (open-, black-, flux-, hacked-, etc.), tiled WMs, etc., are all perfectly serviceable.
Some may look* vaguely dated, but tend to be rock stable and blazingly fast.
XWinMan is still live, I find: <http://www.xwinman.org/>
When I started college in 1993 our default environment was mwm but I quickly switched to vtwm and had a really cool setup. I switched to AfterStep because I loved the NeXTSTEP look and used that and WindowMaker for 10 years before moving to XFCE.
ZFS is an example of one that's recognizable, you can bolt it onto linux and it (now) works quite well, but it was integrated much more into Solaris.
There are also Unix platforms that fully support hot-swappable just about everything, which you CAN do with Linux but it's not as simple.
Most of that stuff is gone by the wayside now, Linux is "good enough".
It won't surprise me if one of these days Oracle decides that Canonical is a ripe lawsuit target over ZFS.
It's similar to the "polish" available on macOS or Windows, Linux has all the pieces but you have to assemble them yourselves, even today.
Because there's a moderate change that it goes against them.
I hope btrfs becomes quite stable and usable.
That whole CDDL/GPL incompatibility is BS.
(speaking as the guy who wrote the scripts to change all the license text, though the actual relicensing was due to a lot of work on my boss's part.)
And canonical includes ZFS, and i think they have more lawyers then you and me.
Do you really think they would take that risk especially with oracle to include ZFS (that is not even their main fs)?
Have some commonsense.
back when, unices were better at real multiuser, while linux was much faster at all sorts of I/O and CPU bound things in the personal-computer, single login context. Like massaging massive amounts text data (which everybody was doing to webify it), linux was blindingly fast, but don't trying to do much else at the same time, it would bring your machine to its knees.