in reply to Re^12: Perl 6 ... dead? (no, just convalescing)
in thread Perl 6 ... dead?

If you don't want your bike or car to be stolen, that's a legal issue. It's the law in fact. Yet there are still locks - a technical solution. And if your bike gets stolen, or your things get stolen from your house, without you having used locks, you might not get payed by your insurance company.

It would only be worth the effort for software for which you expect broad distribution, anyway: if the code is written for a specific customer under contract, it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to insure yourself with simple and effective legal measures.

Last week, I added some copy protection on software with a limited distribution. There are licenses protecting the software. The copy protection won't be hard to break. You might think it's not useful - but actually, it is. Because bypassing the copy protection means someone make a very conscience decision to do so. And they could not claim they didn't realize they were not allowed to.

I'm not even going to go into the ethical issues I have with the idea of profitting from an incredible amount of freely provided volunteer effort while refusing to give anything back.

Oh, get off you high horse. That has nothing to do with this. You don't have any right whatsoever on software I (or someone else) write, unless *I* decide otherwise. No legal and no ethical rights.

  • Comment on Re^13: Perl 6 ... dead? (no, just convalescing)

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Re^14: Perl 6 ... dead? (no, just convalescing)
by diotalevi (Canon) on Sep 02, 2004 at 22:56 UTC
    Well, we *do* get various rights like eventually in another millenium it goes public domain and then your code is a pain. In this millenium, we still get to undo your protections if that's what's required to allow us to get it to work with anything else we feel like trying to get it to interop with.
[reply]
      You talk about "we" and "us". Who do you mean? Long John Silver and his gang of software pirates? No wonder companies are resorting to software patents and trying to get governments to pass laws restricting freedom.
[reply]
        The "we" that gets to do the undoing *today* is everyone that has a license to have a copy of your program. I used "us" expansively and assumed that most people are potentially in the set of people who could have a license to whatever software it was you were mentioning. The "us" and "we" of public domain is everyone, period. Of course, all of this is really from my context as a USian. Most-to-many people here aren't actually present in the US and their own legal requirements are probably entirely different.
[reply]

        diotalevi's concerns are why I personally pick my commodity applications with a strong preference for libre software.

        If enough people do that, the market will eventually take shape correspondingly.

        Take a look at The economics of software.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

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