[pp.int.general] Subject: Re: International Pirates Day

[Philip Hunt]

2009/11/11 Reinier Bakels <r.bakels at planet.nl>:
>> FOSS and Wikipedia are proof
>> that copyright is not a necessary incentive to create complex
>> informational works.
>
> FOSS depends on copyright to a large extent!

I disagree.

> The fact that the programmer
> does not use his copyright (which he gets by law, whether he lieks it or
> not) for commercial exploitatioon, but to decide under what conditions other
> are allowed to use the software he wrote. It is the basis for the GNU
> licences, etc. GNU does not involve money, buit it does involve obligations!
> Such licences can not be created without a legislator-created copyright!

They can be created, but not enforced. Even if the GPL was
unenforceable, FOSS would still thrive, with only minor problems.

If a community of people is writing write some GPL'd software (such as
the Liunx kernel), and I come and make an unfree, proprietary fork of
it, then my fork won't keep track of the changes in the
community-developed version. If I do want to catch up with changes to
it, I'll have to go through a labourious process of re-integrating my
changes with their changes, and I'll have to do this every time I want
to use their new changes. It probably won't be worth my effort to do
this, so it would make more sense for me to make my changes part of
the public community-developed version.

There are many FOSS projects such as Python or Apache that use
MIT-like licences and suffer no significant bad conseqences.

-- 
Philip Hunt, <cabalamat at googlemail.com>
Campaigns Officer / Press Officer, Pirate Party UK