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

Ben Finney ben at benfinney.id.au
Sat Feb 9 10:16:34 UTC 2008


On 09-Feb-2008, Reinhard Mueller 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.

Without copyright, there's no copyright law preventing anyone who gets 
their hands on the source code — like, say, someone working with the 
entity that would otherwise be the copyright holder — from 
distributing that source code to whomever pays them.

-- 
 \       "Don't you try to outweird me, I get stranger things than you |
  `\       free with my breakfast cereal."  -- Zaphod Beeblebrox, _The |
_o__)            Restaurant At The End Of The Universe_, Douglas Adams |
Ben Finney <ben at benfinney.id.au>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20080209/4b2e42c2/attachment.sig>


More information about the Discussion mailing list