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.
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You mean, the same US that's extending the period before something gets into the public domain over and over again? Well, all software I've written is younger than Mickey Mouse, so I guess I'm safe.
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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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I got as far as
...unlike everything else we have ever built, software costs nothing to manufacture, and it never wears out.
and realised exactly what sort of article this was. An artificially constructed, pseudo-economic diatribe attempting to endow an idealogical viewpoint with the credentials of sounds business logic.
The primary premise is simply wrong. To equate the duplication (through copying or transmission) with manufacturing is complete farse.
Examine what is said, not who speaks.
"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail
"Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algorithm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon
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