Comment by Guid_NewGuid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guid_NewGuid | Hacker News Reader

I think people who prefer GPL and I hope for the same outcomes but we have a different (irreconcilable?) philosophical approach to getting there.

In my view code (and all knowledge) wants to be free and a commons of knowledge enriches the whole world. I am opposed to most forms of copyright, patents and intellectual 'property'. Aside: My compromise position to this maximalist view is that I'd accept a 5 year copyright term with an exponentially increasing renewal fee.

For me MIT/BSD/Apache is a way to provide code with minimal encumbrances under the current dominant legal system. GPL is an attempt to free knowledge that relies on the legal system and the threat of men with guns coming to force you to comply. However noble the intentions at the end of the day it is reliant on state force and reduces freedom, it is very good at providing fees for lawyers.

Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.

> Corporations can't embrace-extend-extinguish open source. This is because the source is always available. Sure they can use that knowledge to build a new, more popular, thing, but the existing source never goes away. It represents an un-enclosable commons.

Some counter-examples:

* git is now mostly github

* khtml is now mostly chrome

* linux is now more android and chromeos than linux. Anyhow, the plain kernel is deeply corporate.

You can still fork those project. But it would be mostly meaningless to do so.

But this doesn't really contradict the idea, in my view. Our existing property framework is built around physical goods that experience scarcity. The cost of code duplication is zero and it is (barring catastrophe) indestructible. Today you can browse the git codebase in the same way as 2 decades prior or hence.

All the knowledge in those codebases is preserved for all time, freely available to anyone. They have been built upon in ways that don't necessarily give back but that wasn't a destructive event.

Aside: Though if I remember correctly git and Linux are GPL so they create categories of thought-crime under copyleft if a judge holds your code to be too influenced by them. How influenced is too much? You better have enough money for lawyers to find out.

> code (and all knowledge) wants to be free

What does this sentence actually mean? Every time I've heard of it it is just stated as an obvious fact with no explanation, or it seems to just mean "I want knowledge to be free".

I had prefixed that with "in my view" but in a purely literal sense you're right. Code and knowledge are inanimate objects, they don't 'want' anything. The statement is influenced by my belief, it is merely a common turn of phrase.

To expand a bit more, code is freely, instantly, trivially duplicated, shared and remixed[1]. Much like knowledge there is no scarcity for these artifacts without legally mandated, police enforced, artificial scarcity. If the full source code for anything (Windows 11, EPIC Systems, whatever) was leaked tomorrow that would be a non-destructive event for both the code and knowledge involved. People work around this with trade secrets and intellectual property law but the 'entropic' norm is for these things to become more available, not less.

[1]: Since we're being literal there is of course some energy and time cost to the listed actions.

Some situation being the "entropic norm" that things tend to without intervention is not a good reason to prefer it. If we allowed everything that costs nonzero effort for the state to prohibit, we wouldn't have a civilization at all -- the ultimate "entropic norm" is pure anarchy.

So rather than arguing from these philosophical principles I think it makes more sense to answer a pragmatic and very concrete question: is the world would be better off, or worse, for having intellectual property protections? I think it's clearly better because the existence of these protections encourages people to spend time and effort making creative works (including software). That said; I think software patents are counter-productive, as are extremely long copyright protections for software. But I think that for pragmatic reasons, not abstract ones that seem to fall apart when you examine them closely.

Ultimately you end up in an abstract or values based discussion either way though.

Your question, is the world better off, is impossible to answer in a manner that isn't based in conjecture I feel. Would people not feel the urge to create with a 20 year copyright term? 7 years? 90? zero? Aren't some of the most valuable pieces of software in terms of social good open source? What drives the creation of those?

The closest we have to a counterfactual of the current US based intellectual property hegemony is probably China, who are renowned for their lack of scruples in this matter. Isn't some part of their supercharged technical progress based off willingness to ignore IP? How much? Is California's ban on non competes partially responsible for it's innovative tech sector?

These are all fuzzy questions that are difficult to answer and you end up approaching them with values judgements in mind.

So to restate mine without that controversial phrase; the more people that can access and share information and knowledge the more we unlock the possibility of progress and improvement for the greatest number of people.

Well, that is a more coherent argument than “information wants to be free”. I disagree with your conclusion, but I’ll at least admit that we’ve now reframed the debate in terms I find meaningful: it depends on one’s subjective judgment of the relative importance of two competing interests: on the one hand, the tendency of state-enforced monopolies to encourage producing creative works for profit motives, and on the other hand, the tendency of free information to encourage faster progress.

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