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Comment by ongy | Hacker News Reader

Yes.

There is a pretty good argument that this should be required for copyright protection. The point of copyright is supposed to be to ultimately get works for the public domain, when the copyright expires. If the source code has never been released then it's failing at its purpose. Once a work is in the public domain the public is supposed to be able to make derivatives etc. So to have copyright protection for software you should have to release the source code.

A noble idea, but it should be pointed out that of all of the software ever written on planet Earth, only Ada Lovelace's somewhat notional code for a non-existent machine would be in the public domain in the year 2024. The earliest you would expect to see "modern" code entering the public domain is sometime in the 2060s, and that would be written in Plankalkül.

The same legislative change would do well to moderate copyright terms.

Obviously, if we’d like to require programmers to release software in source code form then we’re going to need some rules. If programmers are made to release software in some source code form then what languages should we require? Clearly, Brainfuck is out of the question, for example. Though, it would do no good to legislate the programming community into a religious war over FP or OOP. My proposal, however modest, is that the law require software be released in some kind of well-specified, portable language. Something succinct and powerful. Something symbolic, abstract, and much higher-level than the underlying hardware. Hm. How about x86_64 machine code?

That's generally handled with a "preferred form" clause -- it must be released in the form it was written in. If you originally wrote the firmware in Brainfuck, it's fine to release in Brainfuck. But you can't transpile to Brainfuck and release that.

This isn’t obvious at all.

Does everyone need to speak German for global logistics to work?

Is all software out there Ruby?

Why the sudden need for a rule that clearly isn’t being followed now and yet no giant foot has squashed us.

The well specified form is local machine state. Run someone’s Ruby, automate capturing the machine state.

You want it a certain way, be the change you want to see in the world.

> Clearly, Brainfuck is out of the question, for example.

Ugh? Are you trying to make selling software written in brianfuck illegal?

> portable language

So all assembly bootstrap code are outlawed?

While this looks hard, the FSF has long ago provided us with a solution.

The preferred form to make modifications on.

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