I'm not disputing that. I just feel the GPL has bad knock on effects considerably underestimated by its proponents.
I don't think the effects are underestimated by me, anyway, but I would note that "bad" is in this instance quite thoroughly in the eye of the beholder...
Neither do I. But it is how the current system works - even something really stupid like goodwill is assigned a monetary value.
Sometimes, but even if it it's not guaranteed to anyone one easily assessed value, and is often disputed hotly.
Remember, we're out to change the system, not perpetuate it in its current broken state, anyway.
My point stands- predefining your buying price is silly when you're out to remain unbought.
What did you think of my arguments (the page is at http://www.nedprod.com/tornado/license.html)?
A point by point analysis will take time that would be better spent developing software, but if I have free time I might do so. In the interim, I hope my general arguments are enough. I've already raised an initial opinion that even if one believes your argument, the dual-licensing option is enough to cover the important bases.
The very phrase "intellectual property" is a propaganda term, as RMS points out - it is simply not the case that information is even remotely like physical property, at least for the present and in macroscopic human life - it is only even vaguely "property" in the twisted legal sense that property is a result of law, not a beginning.
Information is power, and thus it is valuable to those who wish to exert power. For example if most Americans knew the true state of Saddam's Iraq, they would never have let Bush invade that country.
Having value does not make something property, nor is it a valid argument for making it into property, particularly if it's non-scarce. It certainly doesn't have a simple and unchanging value, e.g. value you could depreciate with a simple rule like office furniture. Think about the value of timing of information - yesterday's news today is much less valuable to most people than today's news today.
It's a little more accurate IMHO to say asymmetry of information can translate to power - the value was not in the information in your example, it was in the keeping of information away from the american public. From the perspective of Bush, if he insisted on ascribing the value to the information itself rather than to the propaganda and disinformation service the media and intelligence agencies provided to him, information would have been devalued by sharing, from the american public's perspective, it's value would have increased.
So the value of information is in the eye of the beholder...
All in all, life would be a lot easier if people stopped trying to treat bits like bricks...
See Reiser's comments on why filing systems should be completely rewritten every few years. I completely agree with him except I extend it to most software.
Linux is most certainly not innovative, neither is Apache particularly.
Thus far, we've bandied about the term "innovation". That has a economic meaning - "innovation" is the introduction of something new to a market, often with disruptive effects, think "act of innovation", and a more common, loose usage, largely synonymous with invention, think "an innovation". As far as I can tell, thus far, we've been using the common-usage one, since the economic usage allows evolutions to be innovations. I have continued with the common usage below:
Components of Linux are innovative. System evolution by subsystem revolutions. System revolution by subsystem evolutions. By gerrymandering your system boundaries and lumped-approximating, you're probably always going to be able to declare "innovative" and "non-innovative" bits - "An OS written in C on a Computer? Been done. Bah."
Could Reiser rewrite filesystems without having to rewrite everything else if linux weren't modular?
Another thing is that people often regard as innovative stuff that isn't really but that they don't know the history for. You mention EROS, well, that's an evolution of KeyKOS. There's a also quote, which I'm about to fail to attribute, which paraphrased is - "you can make it big in Computer Science by looking at what people were doing years ago, waiting for people to forget about it, and releasing it as a big new thing": XML<--Lisp sexps, only badly done, OODBMS<--Hierarchical DB (bad idea then, bad idea now...), etc.
There is virtually nothing on Windows or Linux which qualifies as "blue sky" innovative. If you want to see "blue sky" innovative, go look at EROS, Plan 9, Syllable or even GNU Hurd (though ten years ago). That kind of innovation demands total rewrites from the ground up.
And those projects are... open source. Anyway, in the open source world, features and pieces can be interchanged readily - even if no end-user ever bothered with Hurd or EROS, they have already had lasting effects on the design of Linux and other OSes.
And that kind of sweeping change is something free software cannot do because you'll never get enough of a team together to agree on something totally unproven. Only investment capital can pay people to do the work required to prove a concept.
You say that, yet 75% of your examples are GPL and quite actively developed? Whatever. That's a baseless assertion, as far as I'm concerned. Quite apart from the fact that that assumes people need paying to do the work (history has many counterexamples, and I know I do blue-sky stuff just for laughs), significant Investment capital can be, and has been in the past, given to open-source people, companies, universities, and so on. Your generalisations about human motivation, which you've done a few times, are iffy, and probably reflect most on your own motivations.
Agreed. I prefer a clause like the LGPL has which mandates enhancements to some code are returned to the community.
Well, actually, it only mandates return if you _distribute_. If you enhance in-house without ever distributing, you don't need to return.
On this we would disagree. I want a law mandating that source comes with all code.
Nah. In the absence of copyright and patent, binary-only code would soon be outcompeted.
I also want a law giving the mandatory right to anyone to enhance or modify their purchase and share those changes with others. Period, across the board.
Well if you actually "purchase" the copyright to some software, rather than "license" the use of the software, even in the current framework, you get that right. The problem is, people often think (and are misled by the packaging and marketing of software) that they're "purchasing" when they're only "licensing".
One of the best ways to encourage Free Software is actually strict enforcement of EULAs - thanks, BSA!.
Well, they'll do anything they [MS] can to win.
Yep, though I predict they'll eventually burn out, and assuming I'm not hit by a bus or whatever, most likely within my lifetime. All empires fall, and MS's could crumble alarmingly quickly. I do find Linus' recent quote in the new york times amusing:
[ From NYTimes, 2003-09-38 ] The thing is, at least to me personally, Microsoft just isn't relevant to what I do. [....] I just can't see myself in the position of the nemesis, since I just don't care enough. To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.