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Comment by saubeidl | Hacker News Reader

The GPL is a good idea. It's our socieconomic system that isn't.

GPL is a response to the copyright law, which was created for the big corporations to extract rent from ordinary people.

It's copyright law which should go away.

Including the hangups people have about AI training as well.

Copyright law is hundreds of years old and originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.

> originally was intended to prevent owner-operators of mechanical printing presses from printing and selling copies of some author's books without paying them or getting permission.

We agree that that was its initial stated intention.

However, what we have seen in practice is that it has resulted in the owner-operators of those machines banding together to restrict access to the machines unless authors sign exploitative contracts assigning their rights to the operators (which they interpret as "getting permission").

The world has changed substantially since the 1710 Statue of Anne; there's a thousand things that you could call the modern-day equivalent of mechanically printing a book, with myriad capital and operating costs and availability. Many ways an independent author or artist can publish their work are extremely cheap and effective. I'm relatively anti-copyright, but that doesn't mean that everyone currently benefiting from copyright law is rent-seeking in an exploitive way.

It was created when there was a scarcity of content, so state violence was used to encourage production of content.

But now we don't live in the age of scarcity of content. On the contrary, content creators are competing for a possibility to get into consumers' attention span and push their agenda (ads). Everything has changed.

Removing all copyright restriction will not decrease the amount of content available for a person through their lifetime even a few percent.

> It's copyright law which should go away.

This precisely. What started out as a way of rewarding authorship (of text, software, or other things) has mainly become a way of extracting rent -- see the music, movie, and software industries. In the digital age, when the cost of making copies of such works is approximately zero, copyright law ceases to make sense.

Note that this does not mean you cannot make money selling software or software-related services. For example, game developers could still sell keys for online play on their servers even if they couldn't copyright the binaries.

GPL is much more than that. It is distributing the means of production to the tech workers.

rms is the Marx of the 20th Century. GPL is freedom from corporate oppression.

No it's not. GPL is quite the opposite. GPL means that "you own what you buy", which is the foundation of capitalism. You own what you buy, including programs, which you can buy, replicate, modify, and sell.

Due to the nature of software, especially in the 80s, it existed in both text and binary form, which made it easy to perverse the nature of selling software from selling code to selling binaries, and big companies went even further in their collusion with the government socialists by making even re-selling even your own binaries illegal.

GPL is just trying to fight this madness with its own weapon. The GPL is an attempt to go back to capitalism of small business owners and individual service providers.

Going from the capitalism of small business owners to the market socialism of coops is a small step ;)

Well, none of the implementations of Marxism in the XX century worked like this, so I dare to disagree.

Of course, you can always say that America is exceptional, and she will have "Marxism with American characteristics", just like China switched from true socialism to "socialism with Chinese characteristics", but would still recommend avoiding the word which associates with GULAG and mass starvation.

Everything is a good idea if you assume a world in which it works.

Communism has entered the chat.

That, for example, would be a better system. One the GPL would work beautifully in.

If you can't explain why it did not work in the past, and can't explain how & why things will be different this time, you don't have a plan. History is a harsh mistress.

It works, but you need real human staff. And we learn from history that we don’t learn which can be harsh.

Communism worked in China, for some definition of "worked". Stalinism eventually failed in the USSR and elsewhere. An extensive literature explains these things, as well as explaining different forms and varieties of "communism", and things that people call "communism" but aren't.

Communism worked so well in China that as soon as they adopted something resembling free markets in some regions, thanks to Deng Xiaoping, their GDP per capita rose amazingly fast for 3~4 decades. Not exactly a stellar example.

China is still communist. Again communism has worked for some definition of "worked". This is an objective statement, not an endorsement of Chinese communism.

As a person who had a privilege to live in a commie-block half his life, no, it isn't a better system.

That was Stalinism, not communism. And there are many ways to implement communism, some of which are better than others.

If anything, Stalin-era commie blocks are better than the Khruschov-era commieblock I lived in. That particular brand of communism had a tendency to paperclip-optimize everything in a weird way. Like it's really the opposite of capitalism where you go from an MVP to a fully usable product, but in reverse. You would thing it's optimization, but then you regulate the temperature in winter by opening the window.

In terms of housing and speaking only from personal experience, European brand of social democracy seems to get it.

GPLv3 is a bit overreaching , especially in patent clauses. The GPL as idea is great but the license needs a little more refining

The constant fear of lawyers that using some GPL lib will infest entire codebase of their project with GPL is a real problem that stops many corporations from contributing in the first place.

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