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Freedom or Power Redux
Ed. note - a brief response to Tim. A) my name isn't Timothy. (I know, I know, we all look alike. :) And B) I was trying to say pretty much what O'Reilly is saying - that all licensing, including the GPL, is an expression of power over what other people can do with the software. Hence the term "all licensing". If there were no copyright whatsoever on computer code, no intellectual property considerations at all, perhaps we could approach the state of true freedom. In the meantime, the GPL is a good way to place code firmly into a state where it is mostly free - you are free to do anything with GPL code except take it out of its free state. As far as restrictions go, this one is infinitely more palatable than most of the powers that software licensing seeks to exercise over software users.
As a more general point, I take issue with O'Reilly's description of copyright law as a compromise between creators and users. There's absolutely no evidence that the rights of users are considered when copyright laws are made. All copyright law changes made in my lifetime, nearly all copyright law changes ever, have been expansions of copyright law - if it's a compromise, it's an extraordinarily one-sided one. (I suppose you could a describe a mugging as a compromise between the mugger and the little old lady over rights to her purse.) Copyright law is more accurately described as a compromise between copyright holders and copyright holders. Other descriptions are both inaccurate and do a disservice to efforts to reform the laws.
Google's cache works.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
In a few short posts, we've created a conversation that encompasses democracy, socialism, communism, capitalism, and copyright and patent law. I'm not going to even attempt to tie all of this together.
It's ok, I will.
Democracy is a pipe dream, just like communism and socialism. Communism is an ideal where all goods and services produced in an economy are communal, or shared; democracy intends to share the responsibility of governing a nation but most people just don't want it or are too stupid to be trusted with it. Socialism is more of a philosophy of the government taking care of its people and due to far-right rhetoric in the USA, has become synonymous with communism in our vernacular and doesn't apply here.
Capitalism begets copyright and patent law, to ensure that ideas are worth as much as finished product. In a communist state, nobody's work would need any protection because all work is for everyone, not just the guy that made it.
Limiting the duration of copyrights for software is a wise move. The ideas in a book or piece of music are worth something 40 years later - software isn't.
In a different slashdot discussion, someone made a comparison between math theorems and software.
That was me, hello there. I've got no problem with people wanting to give their work away. I've got a problem with people being FORCED to give their work away, which is what the GPL says - if one piece of this software is touched by the GPL, it's all touched by the GPL and must be free. It's like the brown acid of licenses, you take it once and you're screwed.
You are mistaken. You seem to have missed the "(at your option)" that sits smack dab infront of the "or any later version" phrase which means the FSF by default has no power over a GPL'd work unless the FSF owns the copyright to it. What this also means is that YOU have the choice of which license you'd prefer to use (when using someone else's code!) and therefore your freedoms cannot be curtailed unless you allow it.
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC