Freedom or Copyright? - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

[Matthias-Christian Ott]

Reinhard Mueller <mueller at fsfeurope.org> wrote:

> Am Samstag, den 09.02.2008, 12:53 +1100 schrieb Ben Finney:
> > In other words, if copyright truly did not exist, and everyone had the
> > same freedoms (and more) in every work, not just those that have such 
> > freedoms explicitly granted by the GPL, then there would no longer 
> > need to be a GPL.
>
> I don't think so. Without copyright, everybody still had the chance to
> hide the source and only publish the binaries. Everybody still had the
> chance to write software that only works on specific hardware, to write
> software that checks BIOS serial numbers, or whatever.

As mentioned you could invent an other law that prohibits such actions.
But to abolish copyright law you need to have a majority (at least in an
ideal democracy that is not existing) and thus there has to be a change
of consciousness.
Eliminating copyright law only solves half of the problem: It makes
factitious stringency impossible, but doesn't force the manufacturers
to release their source code and allow modification and sharing of it.
When everyone can copy a malicious proprietary software like Windows
Vista without getting sued, it's still a bad system.

> Thanks,
> Reinhard

Regards
Matthias-Christian