Fabio Pesari wrote: > His silence left me some time to think about this issue. I came to the > conclusion that there isn't the mindset yet for this kind of reasoning, > and such proposals can be considered even offensive by some developers.
> I think some developers would feel more comfortable selling their code > to VCs and big companies than the users themselves, even if they got to > keep the copyright and to keep selling the programs. I had a similar experience recently in trying to persuade some academic literature Open Access discussants that CC-BY-SA (the copyleft CC license that corresponds most closely to the GPL) should be the correct license for published academic papers. I pointed out that "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." but I then went on to pioint out that the CC-BY element means that anything which is just a straight copy won't be bought by anyone because it is (or at least should be) available gratis elsewhere (and easily finadable). I then pointed out that the SA copyleft element meant that anyone making some kind of derivative work would have to offer that work under a libre license and that if it was really exxpensive no one would buy it (then who cares that it exists, no one is paying for it) and if it's cheap enough, some group could club together, buy access to a single copy anad then re-distribute. The only respondent just quoted the first line "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." and said that this clearly means that CC-BY-SA is not the right license, competely ignoring my analysis of the implications of the SA element. Sigh. I must also admit, that since I don't generally get paid for my academic writing (*) that I don't really care if someone makes a derivative work and makes some modest money from it. So long as they don't do so by trying to restrict access to my work by me and others, I don't care if they manage to find a way to make money from adding something to my work. But, it does seem like lots of people a) do object and b) seem to think that there is some serious possibility that their work might make someone else rich without them getting in on the action. Of course those of us who've studied copyright and copyleft understand that copyright often favours exactly this kind of exploitation (see the Queen song: Death of Two Legs, for example) while copyleft has a built in limiter. (*) it's possible - I have an undergrad textbook for which I get modest royalties and I COULD register with the UK's copyright licensing authority to get some modest payments if I could be bothered. -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/