Fw: Query about GNU-GPL

[Simo Sorce]

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 03:22 +0100, Niall Douglas wrote:

> You lose the money that you would have earned if someone else hadn't 
> stolen your code and sold it instead of you. I agree it's not the 
> same as perhaps you were a lousy seller and couldn't have made the 
> money anyway - but IMHO if you take risk and be step change 
> innovative, you must get money. In an ideal legal framework, you 
> would be *encouraging* people to "steal" your code because that would 
> generate additional revenue for you - but under such a system, it's 
> no longer stealing.

Niall,
I'm quite surprised after so much time on these list you still have the
courage to speak of stealing.
You sadly remember me of some stupid advertise being added on DVD films
that equate movies download to car stealing, here in Italy.
I remember you had interesting opinions in the past, it seem that time
is gone, sadly.
Anyway it is also surprising to see that you think money is everything
in life. Not all people want money as reward (some do not even want a
reward) for their job, your vision seem to be really distort.

A _good_ legal framework would let anyone have the reward they like, not
necessarily money, as long as it doesn't hurt other people.

> The GPL equates users with programmers as with source access all 
> users can become programmers. Hence my statement stands - under the 
> GPL, everyone donates their work if others do the same.

No, there's still a big difference, the copyright owner still have all
the freedom, even the freedom to change the license. Users don't, they
have freedom to use, modify and redistribute, but they can't change the
license. So there's still a big difference. What you are speaking of are
the BSD-like licenses they equate users and programmers completely.

> Microsoft brought a whole raft of mainframe & laboratory features to 
> the home user in a format they could operate without arcane technical 
> knowledge. If that isn't step-change innovation in a nutshell, I 
> don't know what is.

Niall, this is pure lie. Please where have you been the past 25 years?
Microsoft didn't brought anything like "mainframe & laboratory features
to the home user". Where have you read this lie?

The innovation that made it possible to bring complicated computing
machines to the man of the street was made by others. You may claim
Intel was one of the first that made a chip affordable and powerful
enough to be put in home computers. You may praise Xerox Park
laboratories for the creation of the graphical interface. You may say
thanks to Unix programmers for having made one of the first portable and
usable shell based system. And you may say Apple made the first user
friendly system.

But what did Microsoft?
- Have they ever designed a piece of hardware their system run on?
No.
- Have they designed a good user interface from scratch?
DOS? was that a usable interface? It was crappier then unix, copied down
from CP/M, a lot less powerful and user friendly than others...
Windows 1.0/2.0/3.0 ? The MACs were infinitely better at that time and
came out before any version of Windows.

So in a perfect legal system as you advocate Microsoft should have never
growth, they should have died long ago.


> No they're not. Software is of a fundamentally different type than 
> music, books or movies because /it/ /is/ /a/ /tool/ used to amplify 
> human effort. It is therefore more like a spanner than a song.

It's like both, and equally different. It's a whole different thing with
it's own peculiarities. It's not something you can correctly equate to
any of the two aspects alone.

> Creating music requires money, and doesn't generate much in return 
> naturally (it's why there were so few full-time musicians a hundred 
> years ago).

Ah that's why Beethoven and Mozart do not exist ... all stand clear.
A few hundred years ago there may have been as many musicians as today,
but do you really think you would know? Do you know how many cookers
there where a few hundreds years ago? Or how many shoemakers ?
You know a very few names because only the very brightest and brilliant
ones are remembered in any field of human creativity.

> At the very least, it costs what the artist would earn 
> working in a field or factory for the same period of time and people 
> naturally don't donate much to musicians unless they are very, very 
> good.

Do you think a musicians must do it full time to be good? Do you think
people only care about feeding their stomach? Even a few hundred years
ago people knew there's not only the stomach to be fed, but also the
mind requires some intellectual food. The form: music, theater, games,
etc ..

> Similarly, writing a book requires even more money and generates even 
> less naturally.

Have you actually ever tried to write a book? What money do you need?
Take a pen and paper. You can easily do it in the evening, it doesn't
need to be a full time job. It can, and some people are so good in
expressing their words that are able to make a living from it. But
_writing_ a book does not cost _a lot_ of money.

>  Before the printing press, it took people years to 
> duplicate books and there was virtually no return on investment, 
> hence mostly only monks did it.

This has to do with duplicating books, which is an entirely different
matter, and is completely un-influent today. Today coping cost is ~ 0.

> After the printing press, plagerism 
> was rife and despite copyright, has continued ever since - if it 
> weren't that economies of scale caused only a few printers to emerge, 
> copyright could never have been enforced.

You should study a bit of copyright History. Look at where it come from.
It was never intended to stop plagiarism until very recently. The
copyright history is a story of censorship and monopoly. Please be
careful on what facts you based your opinions on. You are very mislead
on some arguments.

> Nevertheless, many more 
> books got written than would be otherwise if it hadn't been the 
> primary method of disseminating propaganda for centuries.

Yeah Platone and Aristotele where great propaganda ... sure.

> Lastly, a movie requires even way more money again (now you have 
> dozens of professionals to pay over weeks or months) and generates 
> even less again (as a proportion of its costs) than books or music if 
> it weren't for the rule of law and hitherto hegemony of the US movie 
> studios.

That's true for movie makers that are able to express themselves only
through gigantic special effects. They are costly.
But there are lot of other films that cost orders of magnitude less.
I'm not saying we shouldn't see big, costly special effects, but that
cannot be a justification of any sort for a broken system of monopoly
and control.

> The prevalence of each form decreases under the GPL in reverse order -
>  so if you GPLed a movie, it would never get made. If you GPLed a 
> book, anything more than a short one would never get made and 
> besides, too many cooks spoil the broth. You may have some luck with 
> music that doesn't require mixing and mastering, but again they're 
> all loss making ventures.

Oh, so you're still trying to apply a dying market classification to a
new way of production? You seem a man who lived in the mean of the
Industrial revolution that still think in terms of lands and lords,
while the world is changing around him. 

I think you're a bit confused, you're trying to mix 2 worlds together
and see they do not match, they can't match from the point of view you
decided to take.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce - simo.sorce at xsec.it
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