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Comment by meindnoch | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp all these flowery words, but is this suggesting if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests and without compensating me as long as your sales and marketing is better than mine?

I don’t think Rockchip learned from the ffmoeg code. They simply copied it outright without attribution.

I think both of you are right. But OP may think of the larger picture. A bit like 'move fast and break things', that sort of things where you blur the lines when it's valuable enough. Not that I agree with this ethical stance, but surely there's some sclerotic aspect of being too stiff on rules. It's a weird balance.

> if I spend a few years writing some code, you should get to copy it for your own interests

If you publish the code, there's an argument to be made that yes, others should freely use it: if you could (or did) monetize the code yourself you wouldn't publish it. If you didn't, or failed trying to monetize it, maybe it's better for society if everyone else also gets to try?

I do not even like the GPL but there are other forms of exchange other than monetary.

The license outlines the conditions of use. An argument could be made that ignoring the license means you are not paying the price specified.

Right, but what incentives are we really pushing here?

If the only way to make any amount of money or, at least, not be stolen from, is to keep everything internal and be protectionist, then where is the progress?

So much of the modern world is built on open source. Do we really want every company and their mom recreating the world from scratch just so they don't get fucked over? Would things like the iPhone even exist in such a world?

> The LGPL is a product of a very specific moment: European legalism meeting American corporate compromise

If I tend to agree with the general message of the post, this specific point does not make any sense.

The LGPL and the GPL are 100% American products. They are originally issued from the the American Academic world with the explicit goal of twisting the arm of the (American) copyright system for ideological reasons.

That has zero relation to any European legalism.

re-framing this as a PRC vs West thing seems forced and weird

Why does China vigorously prosecute Chinese nationals when they pirate Chinese software?

So progress is always good, no matter how many people's work you exploit without their consent? You have a nice car, can I just take it and use it myself? Why is code any different? Is slavery OK too?

A much more interesting problem is how to create prosperity without throwing people under the bus - with everybody who contributed profiting proportionally to their contribution.

Capitalism has its downsides but one thing that it does better than all previous known systems is efficiently allocate resources that result in productivity. That is, it is the most efficient system we know.

Investment that does not result in utility for the investor leads to reduced investment. This is true regardless of if the “investment” is money or talent”.

Your suggestion that a system that allows people to ignore the price creators demand for their creations will be more efficient has been refuted over and over again throughout history.

Except of course for that one little detail where Chinese companies take out minor improvement patents to kick the door shut on open source projects that they build on top of.

Software licensing is just another form of property rights, and property rights is what society uses to incentivise civility.

> Software licensing is just another form of property rights

That's a pretty substantial assertion and without much to back it up.

The framing of copyright as basically the same as ownership of chattel or land is a propaganda campaign.

I guess who cares about civility if you're the last man standing.

Also - that word: civility. We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

> We're animals driven by self-interest. What should civility even mean here

That self-interest has led to cooperation between humans. Humans have evolved to work together, cooperate, form social bonds, and friendships because doing so improves survival and wellbeing over the long run. Civility is part of that toolkit. It is not a denial of self-interest. Civility is part of that self-interest.

Thank you, this is what I was trying to say… there are incentives to cooperate, even though individually we can be selfishly evil.

> There's a pattern here that's bigger than FFmpeg

Why are you turning this into a discussion about China?

Its not about china.

Its about stealing.

Its not a complex, or western concept.

ChatGPT write this bro?

This perfectly summarizes my feeling about software licenses.

I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

The rest is self-importance from bitter old men.

> I've always found it beyond ridiculous. Either you post your code in public and you accept it'll be used by others, without any enforceable restriction, or you don't. It's as simple as that.

If we can have this, but for everything, so films, books, TV, music and everything else, I'd agree. This however is not the world we live in. The amount of culture we could have from people remixing the past 50 years worth of culture would be incredible. Instead, we're stuck with the same stuff we were over 70 years ago.

The amount of progress we could make in software is probably on a similar level, but the problem is the same as it is with the cultural artefacts. So instead we're stuck in a world where money makes right, since you need money to uphold the laws intended to protect Intellectual Property™. I can't blame ffmpeg for working within the rules of the system, even if the system sucks.

Or even just, have this also apply to the code produced by those using my code. But while that's not the case, copyleft licenses (especially GPL (not LGPL)) are a way to force it to be the case to at least limited extent.

Code is not culture, nor art. I'm not sure why you'd want to compare them.

I want more high quality code and I want more high quality culture. Both have one major obstacle in the way and is at the core of this post, my comment and yours: Copyright. I fail to see why we should make exceptions to copyright for the sake of code, but not for the sake of culture.

Awesome comment. Thank you.

> Declining civilizations obsess over rules. Rising ones obsess over outcomes.

Heard that in a very different context. Care to mention what you are referring to? How do you know?

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