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Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

> When Thuen went on to start his own company to release Visdom (Southfork), Batelle sued for copyright infringement.

I have no idea as to the merits of the case, but I find it funny how liberally some OSS types feel with regard to copyright.

At least for GPL advocates, copyright is a feature, not a bug. "Copyleft" may very well be just a hack of copyright law, but it depends on strong copyright to work at all. That's why so many Free and open source software projects take the progeny and licensing of source code so seriously. It's not simply that we wish to comply with the law, but that the laws regarding copyright are essential to the ecosystem as a whole.

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I think you overestimate the necessity of copyright law to the open source community. Even if the community could not legally force people to play fair with open source code (by releasing modifications, not charging, or whatever the terms are), people would still continue to write it.

Source: BSD and MIT-licensed software.

(Unless I'm misunderstanding, you can charge for GPL software, you just cannot charge for the source once they've got a binary. You also can use your own fork of GPL on your hardware without releasing any source.)

You can charge a reasonable distribution/duplication fee for GPL source code. The early FSF funded itself by selling several hundred dollar copies of GNU (apparently that took a lot of tapes back then).

See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMon...

> You also can use your own fork of GPL on your hardware without releasing any source.

I believe this is no longer true (at least in general) as of GPL v3. In fact this "Tivoization" is one of the very things the GPLv3 was intended to combat.

Software-as-a-Service is another thing they were aiming at... I don't know offhand if it made it into GPLv3 or not.

> Even if the community could not legally force people to play fair with open source code (by releasing modifications, not charging, or whatever the terms are), people would still continue to write it.

There was a reason I made clear to mention GPL advocates. There are differing definitions of "software freedom" that target the developers of software and the users of software.

When your political movement aims to ensure that the source code for the software that people are using is actually available and stays available then you need something like copyleft.

If your idea is instead to ensure that people are free to release source code for free if they wish, then there's not actually a battle to be had! That was how software started out after all, but that was also what led eventually to users being closed off from their source code.

RMS explains it better than I can: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

No, copyleft does not fundamentally depends on strong copyright law. That is just an implementation detail. It would work just as well--better, actually--if it was enshrined in actual law. In fact, I understand this is what the movement actually wants; unfortunately,a law like this is unlikely to get through the legislative process. Happily, we can use some "legal judo" to turn copyright onto itself, creating an opt-in system to remove copyright using existing laws.

In short: copyleft only depends on copyright because it has to, and it only has to because it's a minority position. Actual GPL supporters would be perfectly happy if the equivalent of the gpl was law and normal copyright did not exist.

As its not enshrined in its own law, in reality it does depend on strong copyright law.

Some contributors that you know - perhaps the majority that you know - may be shaky about this, they may not understand this, but it doesn't make it false and nor does it mean that other contributors are ignorant.

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