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Ideologically, it's pretty simple: I don't believe that ideas can be meaningfully owned as property.
Software isn't an idea. It required real work of a scarce-ish resource (software dev time) to create that software. You could make the argument that software, unlike a physical good, can be copied at almost no cost after creation; however, acting as if all forms of IP are "owning an idea" is a weird take.
I'd like to put forward the argument that software _patents_ are the IP that most closely resembles the IP the author seems to hate, and the source of much of the troubles associated with IP in the sofware industry. Additionally, abolishing software patents is a realistic short team goal we can work towards, while abolishing all IP is too extreme to get the average developer on board with.
> however, acting as if all forms of IP are "owning an idea" is a weird take.
Maybe you don't like my phrasing? But fundamentally, intellectual property is a form of property that includes _intangible_ things. How can intangible things be owned? Intangible things aren't scarce.
> Software isn't an idea. It required real work of a scarce-ish resource (software dev time) to create that software. You could make the argument that software, unlike a physical good, can be copied at almost no cost after creation
It's not about the work required to create it or even the work required to copy it. The point is that it's not scarce. That is, I can use a copy of the software without inhibiting your simultaneous use of it. This is a fundamental difference from a physical good. My use of a physical good inherently inhibits your use. This creates conflict and property is a vehicle for resolving that conflict peacefully.
> I'd like to put forward the argument that software _patents_ are the IP that most closely resembles the IP the author seems to hate
I undoubtedly hate software patents. But I probably hate patents in the healthcare industry even more, because I perceive them as probably causing even more harm than software patents.
My article is just biased towards issues in software because that's what I have the most experience with.
> How can intangible things be owned? Intangible things aren't scarce.
Surely you own money?
> It's not about the work required to create it or even the work required to copy it. The point is that it's not scarce.
Right, the copying part is "free". The thing that software licenses try to protect, the part which is not free, is the effort that goes into making software. The end product is not scarce, but the materials that go into it are. So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way, and for open source projects it is hard to add value to the creation process anyways.
It sounds like "intangible" is maybe not the perfect word for it. Money is a promise, so a form of a contract, and promises or contracts cannot be meaningfully duplicated, so they are scarce.
Recordings of thoughts can be duplicated at will, and so are not scarce.
Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts :)
> So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way
If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
> Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts
Yeah, but fractional-reserve banking ;) I'll stop here before we beat this dead metaphor any longer.
> If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
I think pretty much everyone is in agreement with "the law is not great and we should change it", possible most of all the GNU folks. The issue is that this change is slow to come (and somewhat unclear whether it will come at all?) The whole point of the GPL is to use copyright law as a weapon until we can make a world where copyright law doesn't need to exist–I guess a sort of world where you keep around a military in the hopes that at some point people will realize war is useless and we should all be friends. So not using copyleft is being a pacifist (actually, I think this very word appears in the post) but the point is that if you're doing that you're kind of sitting around hoping for a better world while people with guns come and steal your stuff. Which is a valid position, I guess, but I don't think you should be surprised when people come up to you and ask, "why?"
> Surely you own money?
Money as a physical item is tangible, money as a ledger entry has more complicated rules of “ownership”. For example, you do not actually own the money in tour bank account, you have a claim on the assets of your bank equal to the amount on the ledger. Other forms of ledger money are equally bizarre in the limit. Suppose you use a weak address with bitcoin and someone transfers “your” bitcoin to a different account. Its not clear that they committed a crime and there is no recourse for the former “owner.” Similar cases abound with ETH.
> Surely you own money?
No you don't, just like you can't own a kilogram or a mile. Money is the government-approved measurement unit for value.
Money existed before government began to interfere with it, and lots of people own gold and silver coins. Its probablt best to consider government fiat as a special case of pseudo-money.
I'd call it a unit of exchange for things which really are scarce. And even if we do do think of it as something which we have artificially imposed scarcity on, this is an exchange process people opt into willingly. You're still free to consider it non-scarce and worthless. Unlike IP, which is for restricting use by people whether they want to opt in or not.
> How can intangible things be owned?
The same way anything else can be; “ownership” is the legal right to exclude others from some set of actions with regard to something. Whether the something is tangible or not is basically immaterial, except as tongue set of possible actions that might be governed by ownership.
> Intangible things aren't scarce.
So? Property is about structuring incentives to create value, it is not intrinsically tied to scarcity (except that property—the legal exclusive privilege—is inherently scarce even if it's subject is not.)
Just because property can be used to artificially create scarcity, due to laws that were piled on by centuries of history and common use, does not change the nature of property.
You are not contradicting his idea of property, what you say only has an impact on how to use the current system. It's not relevant to the conversation.
The idea is to define property, to get the first principles before deciding how the Law should be to protect those principles.
To put it another way: that the current laws can be used to create a perversion of property that allows artificial scarcity, does not say anything about the nature of property itself.
> property—the legal exclusive privilege
There is a concept of property that predates and transcends your legal system, so this definition is insufficient.
> Property is about structuring incentives to create value
I think we just have a fundamental disagreement. That's not how I see property. I see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution. And I do see it as intrinsically tied to scarcity.
> I see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.
Even if we accept that that is the sole purpose of property, I think it's indisputable that the desire to control due to sweat equity in a creation vs. the desire to free ride on it because it is “not scarce” is a source of conflict in the types of things covered by IP that is in need of resolution.
Probably. I just don't support the use of a coercive government to be responsible for resolving those things.
Considering possession of land is one of the leading causes of war, I would hardly see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.
Money in exchange for property as a lubricant for exchange of property (or the ownership and control over that property) is a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.
> Considering possession of land is one of the leading causes of war, I would hardly see property as a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.
Peaceful conflict resolution only works when all parties to the conflict desire peace. In the presence of a conflict among peace-desiring parties, property is the notion that one party has the right to determine disposition of the tangible item in question. If they didn’t have a concept of property that they all assented to, then they would be more likely to fight about it.
> Money in exchange for property as a lubricant for exchange of property (or the ownership and control over that property) is a vehicle for peaceful conflict resolution.
The right to exchange for consideration presupposes property rights. You’re agreeing with the OP
Strongly disagree. War and conflict is always possible, no matter what you do. But if we had no system for saying "this is mine and that is yours," then even the smallest disputes could lead to violence.
Lots of people have written romance plays, but there's only one Romeo and Juliet.
There is scarcity in the relative value of intangible things.
When I make a copy of Romeo and Juliet, I don’t deprive anyone of their copy. This is what is meant by intangibles not being scarce.
Why should it be the case that non-scare resources cannot be owned? What if there were pragmatic reasons for providing property protections to certain non-scare resources?
I think your argument would be more convincing with some justification as to why scarcity ought to be necessary for property protections.
Property can be conceptualized as a social technology, an idea that is useful for solving problems and accomplishing goals. In that alternative view, we should apply property protections in cases where it's useful, regardless of scarcity.
> Why should it be the case that non-scare resources cannot be owned?
Well, I don't even know what it means to own something that is non-scarce. What does ownership mean? To me, it's _exclusive_ control (or right to control) some particular piece of property. This is a natural thing that occurs with physical property _because_ of scarcity. But it does not occur naturally with ideas. The only way it happens with ideas is if scarcity is created artificially, e.g., by a state.
I'd say "Against Intellectual Property" by Stephan Kinsella is a good deeper dive on this. But some may find it unorthodox.
In the case of intellectual property, it often means a "right to exclude". The right to exclude others from doing something is a property right. Using force to empower some to exclude others from doing something, is itself an idea that may or may not have pragmatic value.
The point is that there are useful views on property that do not require the object or thing to be scarce. For example in the US property is legally the bundle of rights people have in relation to an object or thing (including ideas).
Edit: And you're right, there's nothing "natural" about IP. It's just a tool that may or may not be useful.
> In the case of intellectual property, it often means a "right to exclude". The right to exclude others from doing something is a property right.
in the case of tangible goods, it makes sense because often one person's use precludes another person's use, and each use has a physical effect on the object in question. One person's use of a software doesn't exclude another person from using the same software, so the 'right to exclude' actually means the right to punish someone for using a software or idea. Exclusive use of physical goods makes sense because they are rivalrous. Exclusive use of an idea relies on a complex of relations including a regulatory state with a coercive apparatus. If someone wants to use my house they deprive me of my use of that house to the extent that they use it, and its natural that I would use force to prevent it. In this view, the use of the state coercive apparatus is on my behalf as a person who needs a house but lives in a society that doesn't want houses to belong to anyone strong enough to take them from the (former) owner. If someone wants to use a design that I have created and patented they aren't preventing me from using the design, they are just refusing to pay a license fee for my patent.
Essentially treating physical goods like properties that can be owned allows people to use them and predict their availability and incentivizes the creation of more physical goods, allowing intangible goods to be treated like property incentivizes rent-seeking behavior and allows people to collect rents on goods that could be duplicated for little to no cost.
It may be more useful to consider how copyright has been shaped by powerful interests to reflect their desires rather than how property rights in physical goods arise naturally from the existence and use of rivalrous/scarce goods.
> But fundamentally, intellectual property is a form of property that includes intangible things.
I think the idea of code (or information in general) being intangible has some problems. Point me to information which exists without being encoded in physical phenomena. All information we've ever encountered exists in the form of specific configurations of matter and energy, and is therefore tangible, just as a house or a car is. It is just _barely_ tangible, since there are many more physical configurations which can reasonably encode information than there are physical configurations corresponding to a usable car.
The term scarcity as usually applied to information is also somewhat problematic because it is not applied consistently between "physical" goods and information. Yes, the fact is that information is easy to copy because it is easily encodeable in a wider range of physical configurations. But we cannot reasonably ignore the effort required to produce it if we want to make a fair comparison. The quality we are interested in is how hard it is to obtain, to _have_ something in the first place, not just whether it is easy to copy. Code is easy to copy, but is hard to produce, and hence I would argue it is still a scarce resource in this sense.
> My use of a physical good inherently inhibits your use.
Not if you first make your own copy of the physical good, the same way you do with information. You said it yourself: you can use your _copy_ of the software without inhibiting someone's simultaneous use. It's just that information has the boon and burden of being easily copyable once you've initially obtained it.
You’re conflating software with “the physical medium used to store and run software”. Computers, like the paper that books are printed on, are scarce, but the software or story, is not.
I can recite Harry Potter without the book, the _story_ has no scarcity to it. Similarly, I can write a for loop without reading it’s structure from a hard drive.
I don't think I am, but I am using the word in a way that is not very common, in order to convey a lesson.
Could you have recited Harry Potter easily before you've heard it the first time?
> The point is that it's not scarce. That is, I can use a copy of the software without inhibiting your simultaneous use of it.
That depends. You could view the idea in it's abstract, intangible form; and then the manifestation of that idea in the real word, as symbols (letters, numbers, drawings, notes,...) which reflect that idea. When you download code, you ultimately make a copy of manifestation represented as electromagnetic signals encoded as digital symbols.
The process of having a novel idea consists of assembling mental constructs together as a thought proces and then expressing that through shared social constructs (language, art, symbols,...). What is protected by IP is your claim to be the first person - the original author - having had the idea. Not the idea itself.
The opposite of that is not making that distinction, collapsing the process of making copies of the manifestation of an idea, and having the idea itself into one. This would imply that being the first to have constructed a novel idea is no argument for a claim to intellectual ownership.
The real problem with copyright, though, isn't making that first claim. It's the abstract notion that rights to claim IP can be extended and transferred. Which creates a very different can of worms.
> What is protected by IP is your claim to be the first person - the original author - having had the idea. Not the idea itself.
I think it's just a manner of speaking. In order to create this protection, you have to elevate ideas to some kind of property by creating an artificial scarcity. Or at least, that's the result produced by a system of intellectual property. That artificial scarcity, introduced by a coercive state, is what I'm opposed to.
> The real problem with copyright, though, isn't making that first claim. It's the abstract notion that rights to claim IP can be extended and transferred. Which creates a very different can of worms.
Yes, removing the latter while keeping the former would be a HUGE improvement on the status quo I think. But I still see the former as problematic. :-)
> That artificial scarcity, introduced by a coercive state, is what I'm opposed to.
That sounds like a take on the discussion about the 'social contract':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
I think that both positions are valid. That it is, it's fair to dismiss giving a part of your freedom towards a coercive state. But at the same time, you also forfait the future possibility that you might want to exert exclusive rights over your own intellectual work.
It totally works out if that's a decision made on a personal level. But when you expand that towards a first principle that applies to everyone, you run into issues. After all, authors relinquish control over who gets to use their work and how it gets to be used. And not all contexts in which one's creative work is consumed are equal.
This would range from opposing the use of one's music during political manifestations, to opposing the use of one's code in both private and public ventures which are ethically questionable.
When it comes to software, you can see this in efforts to create copyleft licenses with extra terms & conditions that restrict the use of how software is used. For instance, the Hippocratic License. [1]
[1]
The net result is a contract with an inherent tension between giving as much freedom as possible and being aware of the consequences and ethical considerations of doing so to the point that intellectual property rights are exerted to enforce "desired behaviour" on the part of the licensee.
Removing copyright as a principle entirely removes the option to create such uneasy solutions, but at the same time, it also gives absolute freedom to re-purpose creative works in ways which are - arguably - counter to the interests of the public.
Authorship can still be protected in two ways without property on ideas
1. Ideas as a secret. You can create scarcity at the initial step of sharing. You can even create monopolies at this step. The framework for this is NDAs. The vital difference here is that once broadcast an idea can no longer be exploited by the author. And once shared with a third party, repeated use can not be controlled.
2. Authorship as attribution. This is done by preventing plagiarism.
Replacing IP law with NDA contract law and attribution protection would still allow selling software but not subscriptions for software you run locally. Also it would allow everone to record radio broadcasts, which is illegal now but was never enforced.
I strongly believe the initial sharing of an idea/software/music/etc. Is the right step to create scarcity.
Once something is provided to the public, the public should be able to use it in any way as long as attribution is preserved.
> Intangible things aren't scarce.
That's not true. Time is scarce. Good ideas are scarce (maybe because intelligence is scarce too). Beauty is scarce. Quality of life is scarce. Perfection is terribly scarce...
And I consider that I own my time, for example. I can either consume it myself or I can use it to serve something or someone, probably in exchange of some amount of money.
In terms of physics, the energy you expend when doing that work is the scarce quantity. Time is just the bookkeeping system.
Good ideas are uncommon but I wouldn't call them scarce, since they can still break the rules of scarcity and multiply without bound (i.e. no true limit on the number of people having the exact same idea).
You are taking an extremely theoretical point of view.
There is also no theoretical limit in the number of cars we can produce, for example. I would even say that it is easier to produce a new car than a great idea.
> intellectual property is a form of property that includes intangible things
What we call "intellectual property" is not "property" at all - it's simply a government-enforced monopoly on use of certain ideas (in case of patents) or their expressions (for copyright and trademarks).
Well, yes, that's pretty much exactly the viewpoint I'm espousing here. :-) That is, that ideas cannot be owned and I disagree with the artificial scarcity created by governments.
The entire point of patent and copyright is (in the US): "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
So it's government granting specific _rights_ over intellectual items not the items themselves.
The name is confusing, it's rights granted over intellectual property ("writings and discoveries") to encourage the creators to share them for the common good.
The manifestation of that is ownership over ideas. If I recite the Harry Potter series to someone and they copy it down and publish it, they've violated copyright. That only happens because IP grants ownership over the idea (the story of Harry Potter) itself.
I'm not sure if we are agreeing and just missing each other on the words, it if there is something more substantive between us?
I don't get why anyone believes that owning an idea is more abstract that owning a house. I can easily "open" any door with an ax and/or battery-driven grinder. Ownership is a legal construct of a society, meant to incentivese certain behaviours. It comes with both good and bad. This is true both for houses (inner cities are monopolized by the rich) as for software (key technologies being monopolized by few companies).
People will undoubtably pick this submission apart because opinions on licensing are a deeply personal thing but I’d wager Burntsushi has done more for open source than most of the folk who’ll comment. So pseudo-religious arguments aside, I thank you, burntsushi for all the code you have written.
I know for a fact I use your code on a nearly daily basis and I’m sure there’s others who have equally as benefitted from your work.
I don't really understand the "thank you, dear author of article that somebody else linked here" comments. Is there any specific reason to believe that the author will read it? If not, who's the intended recipient of that comment?
The first part, I believe, is garbage. They might've done a lot or a little for open source, that shouldn't mean their ideas aren't to be criticized or picked apart.
Well it is not unlikely they will read it as they are active on this post.
And the other part is simply just ethos, who the author is does change what kind of credibility you will give an argument.
> And the other part is simply just ethos, who the author is does change what kind of credibility you will give an argument.
Initially, maybe. It sounds a lot like the comment was arguing that people should do as much as the article's author before they are allowed to "pick it apart". That's lazy thinking to me, "that person has done a lot, don't you dare criticize their article". And that, mind you, before anyone had even pulled apart the point, it's some kind of pre-emptive argument to authority.
I think it is completely understandable and forgiveable that you don't know who Burntsushi is, or that he is quite active on HN [1], and I don't think your post warrents the downvotes it has received. This isn't the kind of thing we should expect HN users to know.
In this case, chances are quite good that the author of the article will read the parent comment (and the author has responded to other comments as well)
[1]
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=burntsushi
Thank you! I had seen afterwards that the author was active in the comments, but I notice the "thank you" comments sometimes, and it's rarely obvious that the author is active here. These comments have some weird signalling feel to it, as if the intended recipient isn't the person being thanked, but other people who are supposed to see that humble gratitude. People do strange things, or maybe I just imagine them to.
I don't mind the down votes, I have hidden their effect and all counters to make sure I don't get sad about down votes and don't let my ego get inflated by up votes. Had you not mentioned it, I wouldn't have known, but I'll try to not let it ruin my day ;)
I don't think the parent comment made any prescription on whether 'burntsushi's ideas can be criticized here.
This commonly comes up in discussions where folks release software under a license that allows some bad behavior (like plagiarism) and then complain when that plagiarism happens. People inevitably respond with some low brow blame-the-victim nonsense, "well, that's what you get for using a license that allows it."
This feels wrong. How can someone be a victim of an act they voluntarily declared was okay?
Written agreements like contracts and licenses can never exhaust the possibility space and so its not possible to list every type of bad behavior. It may not be practical for some users to give credit to the original writer so the originator doesn't require it in the license, this doesn't mean its ok for someone to pass off someone else's work as their own.
from tfa:
> This leads to an important distinction that I draw but that seems routinely ignored among denizens of the web. Namely, that laws and ethics are not one in the same. One can be opposed to using a law to inhibit some undesirable behavior while simultaneously finding that behavior unethical.
Laws applying generally differ from your licensing choices in that laws affect everyone, and your license only apply to those who explicitly want to obey them.
Therefore, laws will inevitably end up not matching somoene's ethics, while it's entirely up to you whether you allow others to do things you consider unethical with your software.
So if you do indeed not forbid others from using your software in a way you don't like, you don't have anything to complain about: it was your choice.
* * *
Separately, I'm not certain about the distinction between law and morality. Law is a set of rules of what things shall and shall not be done, being a code of moral rules in this sense. This is also what we use it for: we as societies generally use law to express our ethical stance on murder and violence, for example, but also theft, the permission to take drugs and drink alcohol, to go out at night.
In this case, it's beneficial to my conscience if the law is a codification of my own morality. But the author claims that they make a distinction: there are ethical rules that should not be codified.
Wwere does the line go? I can understand justifying that position by saying that people with different moral codes would riot, making it impractical to forbid what I see as immoral.
I ask this question because that was not explained, and is the justification for preferring to abolish copyright rather than instill the 4 rules, even though the author seems to agree with both, and both are just as impractical to implement at this time (would make people riot).
> So if you do indeed not forbid others from using your software in a way you don't like, you don't have anything to complain about: it was your choice.
I’m not sure you grasp my point; its not possible to list all the things you don’t want to happen. In no way does someone waive their right to “be upset” by neglecting to mention all the things they don’t like in a license.
> Separately, I'm not certain about the distinction between law and morality. Law is a set of rules of what things shall and shall not be done, being a code of moral rules in this sense. This is also what we use it for: we as societies generally use law to express our ethical stance on murder and violence, for example, but also theft, the permission to take drugs and drink alcohol, to go out at night.
This is not really true, law is a means of resolving and preventing disputes by codifying acts and their consequences so as to allow social coordination.
> Wwere does the line go? I can understand justifying that position by saying that people with different moral codes would riot, making it impractical to forbid what I see as immoral.
The case is that people with different moral codes would seek to impose their contradictory codes upon each other so we seek the minimum viable ruleset that allows us to live in peace and leave questions of morality up to the individual and their community.
> I ask this question because that was not explained, and is the justification for preferring to abolish copyright rather than instill the 4 rules, even though the author seems to agree with both, and both are just as impractical to implement at this time (would make people riot).
The author explains his opposition is both moral and practical in nature. Moral because ideas are not scarce/rivalrous and so not properly considered property; and practical because law as an instrument is wielded by interested parties who have disproportionate power to realize those interests using the machinery of social order.
+1. It's important to realize that copyright violation and plagiarism are two completely different concepts. A copyright violation is the non-fair, unauthorized use or distribution of copyright works, which is strictly, formally defined in terms of laws and licenses. On the other hand, plagiarism is a concept from academic ethics, namely, failing to give credit where credit is due. Often, one doesn't have any legal requirement to give acknowledgement in many circumstances, and to what extent an acknowledgement should be given is not always formally defined, it can be personal and subjective. However, overall, it's considered as an act of honesty and politeness. For example, using a result without credit can sometimes be considered acceptable if it's well-known and has a low contextual importance. On the other hand, creating a derivative work based on previous experimental data or literary works without acknowledging its source is considered dishonest, even if it's totally legal to do so when the work itself is published under CC-0.
> _This commonly comes up in discussions where folks release software under a license that allows some bad behavior (like plagiarism) and then complain when that plagiarism happens. People inevitably respond with some low brow blame-the-victim nonsense, "well, that's what you get for using a license that allows it."_
Statements like these reflect the confusion between license requirements and ethics. Yes, it's completely legal to use an existing FOSS work without explicit acknowledgements. And sometimes, it may even be considered by people/authors as totally reasonable (one certainly doesn't expect every single program in existence to acknowledge GCC or clang, unless you are writing a complier based on the ideas found in them).
However, when a company releases a product that is substantially based on a FOSS project (or its idea) legally without giving explicit credit, it's still all but fair for its authors to express their dissatisfaction on the lack of acknowledgement. Sure, the company has the legal right to do so, and not everyone will find that it's problematic. Regardless, it's also certain that it will be criticized by many members of the public as being unfriendly to developers, and I think the existence of such public criticisms is not less reasonable than the act of using something without acknowledgement (read: use without acknowledgement in the way you want, and get criticized in the way we expect).
Giving credit is not fully a legal matter, and I don't think attempting to codify all the requirements of acknowledgement in a bunch of software license is the right way to go. What we need is probably an informal code of conduct on attribution in the software industry.
You can really summarize this as "be courteous"–no law is going to force you to credit people when you use their work, but something inside of you should be telling you that you should. And people you took the stuff from have the right to act surprised when you do this, they just can't go after you legally.
The flip side, of course, is that you can have "picked the wrong license" if your intent was to _force_ someone to do something. The latter does happen a lot of the time, especially when someone goes up against a company that seems to have lost its way morally.
> _The flip side, of course, is that you can have "picked the wrong license" if your intent was to force someone to do something._
Yes, for this purpose, copyleft is an example which forces everyone to keep the software and its derivative works free, and from history we know it's very effective. Nevertheless, I have some doubts on whether a copyleft-style acknowledgement license will effectively work in a similar way as we described due to some practical problems below.
First, it has no power on independent implementations. In the academia, if J. Random Hacker developed a new algorithm that solved an important problem and published under a free license, sequentially, all the relevant papers that come after that will acknowledge that "In 2020, J. R. Hacker, et al. developed the first....", even if what the paper shows in an independent research not directly related to the original. However, such acknowledgement can never be enforced using a license. This is not just a hypothetical scenario, earlier in this year, the first controversy on using FOSS without acknowledgement was the AppGet incident [0], which has received strong attention to the community. If my observation is correct, it's how the current discussion began. However, in this case, Microsoft didn't reuse any the original code from AppGet - WinGet was an independent implementation by Microsoft in another programming language and has no similarity to AppGet at the source code level. However, the accusation was that "WinGet works pretty much identical to the way AppGet works", in other words, it only served as an inspiration for Microsoft on its high-level architecture. In the academia, we certainly expect such inspiration to be acknowledged, on the other hand, an "attribution" license will have zero legal effect - If the proposed license cannot even address the prime controversy that triggered the entire discussion, what's the point?
Second, if acknowledgement is forced by a license, the license must be careful not to overspecify the acknowledgement requirement. A historical example of overspecification is the original 4-clause BSD license, which includes an advertising clause, "_all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>._" It requires _all_ promotional materials of a product to include an acknowledgement if a piece of 4-clause BSD software is included. Such a requirement is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, it must acknowledge 1,000+ projects (even in a one-page poster) to comply with the license [1]. Thus, the copyleft-style acknowledgement license must include some forms of "escape" conditions to allow one to skip acknowledgement.
Examples: you can skip the acknowledgement if...
1. If you are shipping more than 10 programs simultaneously.
Failure mode: This requirement is too simple. A bad company will simply ship a bunch of packages to get a free pass. Thus, the conditions should be more robust if your intention is to force bad actors to behave in certain ways ("someone goes up against a company that seems to have lost its way morally").
2. If it's used in an unmodified form (LGPL-like).
Failure mode: If the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again, and everyone has to spam acknowledgements everywhere. Thus, conditions of higher complexity should be used.
As you see, in order to avoid inadequacy of the license, and to prevent bad actors to abuse the escape clauses, I'm afraid that it's possible that these conditions can quickly become extremely convoluted and difficult to follow. Perhaps someone can come up with an elegant solution, but I'll remain skeptical until the solution is demonstrated.
Third, this hypothetical copyleft-style acknowledgement license would be incompatible with most existing copyleft licenses, namely GPL (unlike most pessimistic licenses, which are GPL-compatible), making it impractical in the larger established community. Traditional copyleft licenses, such as GPL-2 or GPL-3, explicitly forbids relicensing to prevent a bad actor from nullifying its the copyleft nature by additional restrictions. Since no additional licensing terms shall be added, any code under the acknowledgement license can never be used in a GPL'd project, nor can it use any GPL code. Even worse, multi-licensing, the traditional solution to this cooperation problem cannot be used - In the existing community, if cooperation between GPL and BSD developers are needed, the code can be explicitly dual-licensed or even triple-licensed to avoid compatibility problems, for example, Linux kernel has dual-licensed GPL/BSD code, and Firefox is available under three licenses. However, if multi-licensing is applied to a copyleft-style acknowledgement license, the license becomes useless and pointless to enforce, since a bad actor will simply select an alternative license.
In conclusion, I'm not sure whether a copyleft-style acknowledgement license is a good idea.
[0]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287
[1] Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using this license, which is what has happened to the original BSD license.
> This feels wrong. How can someone be a victim of an act they voluntarily declared was okay?
Mutual vulnerability is one of the keys to healthy relationships (in marriage, teamwork etc). From this perspective, the discussed statement makes perfect sense to me.
People avoid building relationships with invulnerable, and normal people don't optimize for their own invulnerability, to not miss out on relationships.
I would think the reason is that in those cases, when they "voluntarily declare it was OK" that wasn't actually a conscious decision, i.e. they said yes to one thing without realising that that by definition also implied saying yes to something they'd rather not say yes to. So they are a victim of their own mistakes.
Compare it with me not realising I'm logged in to the production database, and accidentally wiping it. Sure, you could say "that's what you get for logging in to the production database", but you could also say that maybe the organisation setup shouldn't have led me to logging in there.
Yes, sure, but that's not a useful analogy when it comes to what people picked for their licence. There's no equivalent "company you were working for" to blame a process failure on, and picking the wrong licence isn't even a process failure. It's either an individual failure at the time, or it's someone who changed their mind.
I'm not arguing whether or not it's nice to do this, but I think it's important to be clear that what you set out in your licence is important, and your fault if it's wrong.
Yeah. The talk of "full coercive power of the state" seems to be nonsense given that copyright infringement is not a criminal matter; if you don't want to use the court system to pursue someone who infringes your copyright, you can just... not.
But that's not a guarantee that others have. All they would have is my word. Copyleft works because it is, ultimately, backed by law. If I used copyleft but promised not to pursue violations of copyleft, what exactly would that accomplish?
Sometimes copyright infringement is criminal.
Licensing is a utility. I have never really understood licensing as a political movement.
In the past I have contributed to open source because I created tools that were useful to me and could be useful to other people. By exposing such a tool other people report defects and the tool gets more sturdy. I would normally just license things with CC0.
In my current project I am using the most restrictive open source license I can find: AGPLv3. The idea is to expose the source code to encourage trust and allow other people to reproduce the work in a practical manner without sacrificing authorship or trust. I considering turning the project into a business in the future would like to retain control of the idea and limit competition without sacrificing trust or integrity.
None of this reasoning is political. It just about writing better software.
I respect your position, and in general I agree. But your position on what political is, feels a bit unholistic. When more than one person is involved, everything is political, and very much so if you talk about contracts between people, which licenses are. A contract is a construct, it’s something that doesn’t exist, and has a lot of grey area. There is a system in place to debate whether specific actions are respecting the idea of the contract, in the case of licences, this can be a court of law.
Wanting to write better software is a good, and I would think quite common goal. But so is wanting to have a good life. It’s on the road to that goal, with a lot of other people wanting the same goal but having just a slightly different idea of how to get there, that it gets political.
Well, as I pointed out, my goal is for as many people to use my software as possible. The choice of license impacts this goal.
One could also make hand wavy arguments about more use leading to better software. That's certainly the case for much of my code. If fewer people used it, it might not have improved as much as it has. (Obviously "more use" is not the _only_ path to better software! And it does not guarantee improvements either.)
I can say that without a doubt, if I had released, for example, ripgrep under the AGPLv3, far fewer people would be using it today.
Copyleft licensing aims to use the procedure of law to protect user freedom and provide users legal rights and obligations. Say what you will of RMS but you can't easily argue he wasn't being _serious_ when he created copyleft licensing as a means for providing users with legal protections that would be defensible in a court of law.
Eh? My post says nothing about RMS. And I certainly never said copyleft or its proponents weren't serious.
There's a lot of comments about "ideas are not scarce". Here's the bit that mentions it.
Ideologically, it's pretty simple: I don't believe that ideas can be meaningfully owned as property. That is, I see property as a means to non-violently resolve conflict over scarce resources. But ideas are not scarce, and thus, to me, they are not property and thus should not be treated as property. This is a fundamental assumption on which all intellectual property rests, and so, I reject it from first principles.
As I see it, there's some transitive logic being invalidly applied here. The post also says it's from a viewpoint of practicality. I consider the AGPL style licences are being used for practical goals.
For me whether or not to use a permissive license for a personal project is pretty easy: if I'm writing a library or trying to promote an open standard, then it'll probably be in my interests that a lot of people use it in their own projects, even if I don't get to see exactly _how_, so I'll try to make it MIT/BSD licensed. If the code I'm writing is supposed to be an user-facing "finished" product, then it'll probably be in my best interests that if people want to make something based upon it that I'll be able to see some of that work, so I use (A)GPL. Has worked pretty well for me so far, I still believe that the copyright system, and indeed IP law in general is deeply flawed and in dire need for reform, but that's how I make do for now.
While I oppose all forms of intellectual property, this opposition is rarely practiced. I regularly publish software that is copyrighted by me.
Trying to read the article in the most positive way, I agree with it. Copyleft would not be needed if copyright laws were reasonable.
But, being a practical person, I understand that we live in a different situation. Copyright exists and is designed to serve a set of interests that usually does not include the general public.
Copyleft is a great way of assuring freedom. MySQL is an excellent example on how non-copyleft open licenses may give you freedom in practice but end meaning the end of a product. QT is going the same road.
Many "open source" products are freemium products were the "open source" part is good enough to make difficult to justify the creation of competitors but bad enough that anyone with a serious use have to pay for the professional version.
Linux is great and free because its copyleft license. It makes it really hard to embrace and extinguish the project.
one of my main goals is for as many people as possible to use it, regardless of whether it's other individuals or giant corporations.
This is a false dichotomy. The bigger corporations use Linux and other copyleft products. They are just forced to give back to the community, and only if they offer that product externally. There is limitation on the abuse not the use.
> This is a false dichotomy.
There is no false dichotomy because I never set up any kind of dichotomy. I'm just listing examples of folks that I want to use my code. And you left off the rest of my quote that explains in a bit more detail:
> Given the current intellectual property regime, corporations are incentivized against the use of copyleft software in a large variety of circumstances. Thus, copyleft software, particularly libraries, is regularly avoided by corporations. Since some of these corporations also play a huge role in the FOSS world itself, this leads to systemic network effects that push folks strongly towards the use of permissive licenses. Thus, putting aside ideology and activism, it is simply a reality that if I publish a library with a copyleft license, it's less likely to be used by folks, which is inhibits my goal.
The fact that corporations do use copyleft in some places doesn't negate this point at all. It's pretty clear that there are a wide variety of circumstances in which copyleft _is_ avoided.
This isn't theoretical or hand wavy. I have direct experience with this. One of the criteria Visual Studio Code used to evaluate ripgrep was its permissive license.[1]
[1] -
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/19983#issuecommen...
> This isn't theoretical or hand wavy. I have direct experience with this.
Yes. I never questioned that part.
> corporations are incentivized against the use of copyleft software
And what is that incentive? Permissive licenses. Remove all MIT licenses and replace them with copyleft ones and you will see drastic increase on Copyleft usage.
Opposing copyleft because corporations is harmful for everybody. I understand why corporations choose non-copyleft and that exact reasons is why copyleft is so important.
You have it backwards. The incentive is not permissive licenses. The incentive structure confess from the IP regime itself. People treat patents, trade secrets and so on as things of value in their own right. Copyleft could force the publication of code that companies want to otherwise keep private. So they are incentivized to use permissive licenses to avoid that scenario.
That is, the only reason for permissive licenses is to let corporations own code.
No. And it's not just corporations. Because of our IP system, IP (patents, copyrights) ends up being part of the portfolio of _any_ company, including a startup. If the startup is looking to get acquired, that IP ends up being a part of the value of the startup.
And besides, some people might not believe in or care about the four essential freedoms. They don't have to be corporations.
And then of course, there are the ideological reasons that I listed in my OP.
The licensing requirements of third parties then was the reason you switched to MIT license? Was there a key-moment and would you be okay to share more about it?
Hmmm, maybe there is some confusion here. At least for ripgrep in particular, it has always been dual licensed under the MIT and the UNLICENSE[1]. This was itself a continuation of a decision I made a bit earlier with regards to another project[2]. Namely, I had been using only the UNLICENSE. But dual licensing with the MIT allowed folks with a more conservative risk profile to use the project.
But the point of linking to VS Code's decision was to say that I have direct experience with situations in which a copyleft license might have inhibited use of my software. That is, it's an example that runs counter to my goal of as many people using my code as possible.
This doesn't mean copyleft is never used in popular projects or that copyleft somehow perfectly inhibits popularity. I mean, obviously that's not true. But the existence of popular copyleft projects doesn't mean that copyleft isn't itself a barrier to use in other circumstances.
[1] -
https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/COPYING
[2] -
https://github.com/BurntSushi/byteorder/issues/26
_> Copyleft is a great way of assuring freedom. MySQL is an excellent example on how non-copyleft open licenses may give you freedom in practice but end meaning the end of a product. QT is going the same road._
Both MySQL and Qt are licensed under GPL/LGPL, unless you pay for a commercial license. So, if anything, they are examples of copyleft licensing.
On the surface of it, yes, but at least in the Qt case, the Qt Company is exempt from obeying the GPL by requiring contributors to assign them copyright, effectively making the codebase permissive for themselves and only themselves.
> Copyleft is a great way of assuring freedom. MySQL is an excellent example on how non-copyleft open licenses may give you freedom in practice but end meaning the end of a product. QT is going the same road.
Can you elaborate on this? According to Wikipedia[1], MySQL is licensed under GPLv2, and iirc that is a copyleft license?
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL
Intellectual property doesn't rely solely on law, there are technical means to enforce it like DRM, tivoization, SaaSS and, well, monopolization, you can't defeat them by just walking and talking. He literally complains that copyleft doesn't allow corporations enforce their intellectual property. What he opposes?
When I say "intellectual property" in the post, what I mean is the system of laws and court systems built up around it to support it. Because ultimately, that's where my issue lies.
When it comes to DRM and the like, it falls into the category of things I'm personally against but don't think there should be laws prohibiting it. This falls out of my section on "laws codifying the four freedoms" I think.
Well put and understandable. I write proprietary software for embedded systems and I am thankful for people with more permissive licenses.
If I find useful copyleft code I would copy the code to a degree because I read it and cannot forget about it. I do try not to make a simple copy and in most cases it is just a tiny subset of the original, but a case could be made that it is still the same in abstract.
I do think that copyleft should have its place though, it doesn't have to be either/or. Especially in todays world where systems get more and more restrictive, it is a good license to have for some projects and ensures that ideas continue to be shared.
I feel code copying is a somewhat overrated problem. Pretty sure everything written before is 80% wrong and must be redesigned, how people resist the urge?
I'm not sure why pharma constantly gets a poke whenever anyone discusses copyright and patents. It's just a normal industry, it feels like everything is biased simply out of Heinz dilemma and that there is more often a moral dilemma involved. The reality is pharma are not that bad at all for the most part. Big pharma are increasingly embracing being open too, it's just far more cost effective and if you own the compounds someone else finds a use for then everyone wins money wise. The openness is only founded on the ability to own and control
It's not remotely a normal industry. It's one that profiteers on medicine that literally saves lives. That upsets me, even if I understand it's the world we live in.
> It's one that profiteers on medicine that literally saves lives.
Imagine that tomorrow some software you have written, or just something you own in your house, "literally saves lives".
Would you be happy to be forced to give it away, if it's not what you intended to do with it?
Would you be happy to be forced to keep producing it at a loss to yourself?
Would the same medicine be created (often costing large sums of money) if they didn't have the incentive of profit? What's the alternative that creates the same quality and quantity?
Software is the special case, I think. Plenty of open source software gets created because the developers themselves need a problem solved and then decide to share the result. If you applied that to Pharma, wouldn't that lead to the things being researched that researchers are affected by?
Plenty of medicine IP is created by taxpayer-funded university researchers and then patented by companies. If we eliminated drug patents, it doesn't eliminate medicine research because that's happening independently of profit motive (though still not necessarily independent of funding motive). It just eliminates the monopolization of medicine. Pharmaceutical companies could still make a profit because they'd still be important for manufacturing the drugs and could charge a markup for it. And since they wouldn't be paying for the patents and any pharmaceutical company could compete with any other, it could lower the cost to the consumer.
Sure, but would it be the same amount of research, i.e. if privately funded research went away, would the state funded research scale up? Would they look at the same topics, e.g. would you get sildenafil from universities, or would they concentrate on "the important problems" and not serve the markets that customers _also_ want?
Profit is a very strong incentive, and it also allows customers to have a vote in what gets researched. I'm not convinced that a more centralized research system delivers at the same level, especially in the long run. It's hard to judge, of course, because we can't run perfect simulations and e.g. look at the monopolies in telecommunication and compare them with a market in the same time and under similar circumstances, but it suggests that monopolies aren't that helpful to R&D. You could argue that the universities would compete, but either funding would be based on output (in which case the universities would just replace the pharma companies), or it wouldn't be (in which case they wouldn't really compete).
I'm not a huge fan of the pharma industry, but I'm not convinced a system that doesn't incentivize research success can deliver the same.
one reason is because the ability to profit from patented drugs incentivizes corporations to invest large amounts of money in r&d for novel compounds (sometimes a minor variation of an existing old compound) rather than investigating the efficacy of drugs and compounds that already exist and have therapeutic uses since ancient times. This creates a system where life-saving drugs are so expensive that people need insurance to afford them, which shifts the cost to corporations and other people, makes the patient dependent on their employer, and prevents lots of people from even accessing the drugs. Then people react by pursuing "alternative' remedies that may or may not work, and may or may not also have their own side effects, however there is not a corresponding investment in the efficacy and side effects of these "alternative" approaches, allowing quacks and charlatans to exploit the sick, poor, and ignorant.
Patents only last 14 years, they are much less problematic than copyright.
I respect BurntSushi's stance and I think it is a valid one. However, the disapproval of the use of copyright as a hack against itself is ideological in nature and is therefore somewhat contrary to deep practicality.
But, I also explained why the hack (in this case, copyleft) is, in practice, contrary to my goal of sharing my code with others. So it's not just ideological.
True. However, I'm delineating here between the disapproval of the use of copyleft as a mechanism and your personal (and practical) preference to use something else that suits your needs better.
In essence, I think copyleft has its place and its existence is not in opposition with the notion that ideas cannot be owned, but I do see how it doesn't play out well for you practically.
So do you have any thoughts on how to get to a place without intellectual property?
No idea. Sadly, history seems to suggest that changes this big only come after some kind of considerable pain. Maybe it's possible to slowly evolve away from it, but I doubt I'll live to see that. As I said, I'm a terrible activist. :-)
The best I've got is to just slowly try to normalize copyright subversion. I try to do that by using the UNLICENSE in the hope that others are exposed to the idea and repeat it if they like it.
"Thirdly, there are practical reasons to oppose copyleft. Namely, when I publish source code, one of my main goals is for as many people as possible to use it, regardless of whether it's other individuals or giant corporations."
This seems to be possibly the most salient reason people who otherwise oppose copyright oppose copyleft. This is a conflict between people who are ideologically liberal who are attempting to engage in a kind of left politics. They display willingness to allow corporations and capitalism generally to exploit their work on their own terms without giving back. They generally accept the economic order.
On the other hand, if you are a committed anti-capitalist: who care? The corporations, the bosses, the exploiters. They should all perish from the earth anyway and we should feel absolutely free to use the system they constructed against them and for each other.
Our own individualistic tactics of not partaking in distasteful systems is idealistic and due to the power imbalance will not amount to much. Only tactics that force decisions and build dual-power communities can correct such a situation.
Bear in mind that if we decide to use copyleft as a tactic against corporate rule en mass, it is flawed as it is to _use the power of the state_ against corporate interests _which own the state_. This is a severe limitation because if it becomes enough of a hindrance, the state will just pass something like a "national security" exception to copyleft and every defense contractor and company over a certain net worth will qualify.
Anti capitalism doesn’t mean abandonment of principles, and in particular leveraging the enemy’s tools (ie the state) only leads to failure for leftist projects. See: USSR, China, every social-democratic party everywhere
I think we are in agreement? I would note that the latter part is fairly contentious depending on which leftist you talk to.
Right, but I think the past century has demonstrated that authoritarian communism has a poor track record at actually abolishing communism, so perhaps we should try something else