On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:25:27AM -0700, Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade wrote: > In my experience, people who insist that the GPL is the answer and > copyright should be abolished don't see the whole picture. The free software and the scientific communities have a lot in common. In both, it's often the case that making money off your work is difficult, though sometimes possible if you leave the community (hoard your knowledge, get patents or proprietary licenses, etc.). Both flourish in the least capitalist of places--universities, publicly funded institutions (government), and labs of large corporations.
As for abolishing copyright, there are other models to consider. Copyright, patents, etc. are based on the idea of granting a monopoly to a person or group of people so they can market it. This is at odds with the scientific and free software ideas of community. People whose work benefits the public as a whole can, and have been, rewarded for thier contributions with public funding, without being granted exclusionary rights to thier ideas. This affects much more than software and science. Books, music, animations, even movies are being produced and released under thier equivalents to free software licenses. A couple of examples: http://freeculture.org/manifesto/ http://www.elephantsdream.org The whole picture, as I see it, is that an unintended side affect of the availability of home computers is that people are gaining the means to produce content of all kinds. We are finally becoming more than just consumers, and to the extent that we do so, we prove that capitalism is not the only viable economic theory. We prove that there is a better alternative whose goal is not profit but community. -- Martin Franco <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: 2B01DD81 Keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
