. . . and many of the other so-called free software licenses. But you
ought
to realize that the only way they exist or CAN exist is through the
existence
of and the respect of intellectual property rights. Otherwise, the
software
that relies upon these licenses could just be ripped off by others
into closed
software -- much like already has been done with software
covered by the BSD
license.
Personally, I cannot see why software is covered by copyright at
all.
Because of copyright, you can be prevented from reverse engineering it
and discovering how it works. And copyright is supposed to cover
expressions,
not ideas. I don't understand how a piece of software that you
can't read and
that functions only to get a machine to do something is an
"expression." And I
don't see how the huge penalties for single acts of
copyright infringement as
long as 90 years after the work is created serve
anyone but lawyers and big
media and software companies, not
necessarily in that order.
At least, if
software in the form of object code were covered exclusively
by patents rather
than copyrights, you wouldn't have to fear five or even six
figure statutory
penalities for a few or even single acts of infringement, and
you at least know
how the software you were using worked. And, instead
of having to wait 90
years before the software falls into the public domain,
you would only have to
wait 20 years. You would be far less likely to have
your data orphaned by a
software publisher going out of business or of
having to search for hardware
many decades old to have to recover your
data.
And the whole concept of
free software could be enforced by patents
rather than by copyright, written in
language that doesn't have to hide the
fact of what it is that the patents are
covering -- insofar as
programmers are capable of documenting their work and of
expressing
themselves in a natural language. However, that idea seems more and
more remote to me, if only as a software user.
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