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Comment by billy99k | Hacker News Reader

I argued this point in the early 2000s when Richard Stallman was seen as a god in the software community and tried to convince everyone that this would be the new business model for software.

The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.

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>> The same could be said about copyrights/patents (another point argued over the years). If you get rid of these protections for everyone, the only people that will end up on top are the large companies with lots of resources that can just take your ideas and not compensate you.

But isn't that exactly what we have now with the existing patents and copyrights implementation?

Maybe some people are getting some money, but I know if Amazon (random example company name) violate copyright or a patent of mine, I don't have the resources to take them to court over it much less win.

Sure, but if you have a strong copyright infringement case, couldn't you team up with a litigating company and take on Amazon? I am not sure that in any industry any tiny mom and pup shop can take on the largest corporate player without any cooperation from complementary interests...

In my experience, most law firms won’t go near big tech because of their litigious nature. Just the sheer amount of time and filings by big tech, legal or not, is enough to totally overwhelm an inexperienced legal team. It’s like a denial of service attack but through the court system.

The firms that will fight them are few and far between, and are priced accordingly.

But this is exactly why Stallman promoted not just Free Software, but specifically Copyleft software (via the GPL and then the Affero GPL).

Copyleft still removes the most common and available means for small inventors or businesses to get back *something* for their work.

Stallman has honestly done a ton of harm to our field. His “business model” reeks of ivory tower privilege and has ripped a ton of wealth and, more importantly, self-confidence, out of developers worldwide for at least 15-20 years now.

We all need to wake up to this.

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