Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products? See you can't have your cake and eat it. Either you believe there is a thing called a license which travels with your product and binds the user as to how they can use it, or you don't, there isn't really any middle ground there. The alternative is "everything is public domain!" in which case, no GPL.

View on HN

I would expect that nearly any supporter of the GPL would also support a change to the law that eliminated copyright restrictions on the use of code.

The purpose of the GPL is not to prevent people from modifying and building on the code. The purpose... well, let me quote from http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html :

  There are four freedoms that every user should have:

    the freedom to use the software for any purpose,

    the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,

    the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and

    the freedom to share the changes you make.

The GPL is a clever legal "hack" to achieve this, by allowing the code to be used only by others who agree to play by these rules. If the law were changed to enforce these rules directly, then no GPL would be needed. And eliminating intellectual property law restrictions on the use of code would get almost all the way there. (Companies would still be free to "protect" their code through secrecy: releasing only the compiled version and not the source code, but decompilers are pretty darn effective.)

I would expect that nearly any supporter of the GPL would also support a change to the law that eliminated copyright restrictions on the use of code.

WTF?!? No way! (although to be fair I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "use of code").

Companies would still be free to "protect" their code through secrecy: releasing only the compiled version and not the source code

This is exactly what the GPL is designed to avoid.

As you quoted above "the freedom to change the software to suit your needs" - that requires the source code!

"This is exactly what the GPL is designed to avoid."

...sort of. Source code access is important, sure, but here are a few more important issues that are basically orthogonal:

* The right to redistribute software

* The right to modify software (without source code?!?! Sure; imagine if I took Windows, removed the license protection code, and distributed that copy to you).

* The right to use software -- this, incredibly, can be a problem:

http://jalopnik.com/192843/robot-let-my-car-go-new-jersey-ga...

I would expect that nearly any supporter of the GPL would also support a change to the law that eliminated copyright restrictions on the use of code.

Only if distributing software without its source was also made illegal.

There is, in principle, nothing preventing us from applying "if you are distributing software, the source must be made available to your customers" to all software directly in law rather than through hacking copyright.

Or we could create a new system, one not based on the idea that you can own math and poetry, one not based on promoting the interests of publishers, and one that instead encourages the sharing of source code. The GPL is just a way to establish such a system by using the existing approach. There is no reason why we could not scrap copyrights (at least on software) and write a law that codifies the GPL more directly -- say, that any software user has the right to request a copy of the source code for their software.

I'm not saying it is a realistic possibility in today's world, but it is not as though the copyright system is the only system we could have.

> Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products?

Nothig. But then, a company wouldn't have the entire governemnt's power to persue and extract money from people using their software. It's a completely different equilibrium, you can't just look at one side of it.

And I'm not saying it's a good thing either. Altough I defend that it's not smart to depend ("depend" excludes games, by the way) on proprietary software, I never tought it was immoral to create it, until the NSA scandal. Now I don't have any firm opinion about it.

> The alternative is "everything is public domain!" in which case, no GPL.

There are many, myself included, who would be happy with this endgame. As long as no one can ever be prosecuted for creating a work, I am happy.

The GPL is needed because of the effects of copyright, not vice versa.

> Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products?

You can do this even with IP... if you're building SaaS instead of shrinkwrap, due to the GPL's most relevant restrictions here all hinging on the act of distribution of the actual software.

> Without IP, what stops people incorporating GPL code in their closed source proprietary products?

Without IP, there can neither be GPL (which licenses IP rights) nor close source proprietary (which is another model of licensing IP rights).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com