Richard Damon <rich...@damon-family.org>: > Copyright law is not what makes something 'closed source' in the eyes > of the Open Source community. For example, Microsoft doesn't use > Copyright to keep the source code for Windows secret, they just don't > provide it.
It would leak out with developers who move to new jobs. And that would be good. > The thing that gives the Open Source licenses the power to force > people to share the source code is that their IS a copyright on the > source code and the usage license on it demands revealing > modifications to others. Most open-source licenses don't have that stipulation: <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_and_open-sour ce_software_licenses> In particular, CPython's license doesn't seem to require it: <URL: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/LICENSE> > If software providers could no longer depend on Copyright law, then > you would see much more use of the hobbling copy protection > technologies, and automatically enforced licensing methods. That, and > a lot less software produced. The consequences would be hard to estimate precisely. You don't need so many reimplementations of ideas if good ideas could be copied freely. I believe the society would gain faster progress of software solutions with the copyright restrictions gone. Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list