> Proposal to shorten copyright to 5-10 years wouldn't prevent philosophy of free software to function.
It would certainly not be helpful to the implementation of the philosophy of the part of the Free Software movement (which includes RMS) that wants to prevent non-free software from being created to the extent possible.
> The issue is that whether the free software people want it or not, the copyright system over code exists, and historically has been used as a cudgel against smaller players. If we got rid of copyright over code entirely I'd totally be down for this. And IIRC RMS has said the same thing; that he'd be in favor of the removal of copyright over code as a concept even if it meant neutering the protections of the GPL.
As someone else asked, I would also want a citation, but I agree.
Actually, I want a license that you can do pretty much anything you want to do with it (including: lack of attribution, distribution without source codes, distribution with source codes (whether they are the original source codes or reconstructed), lack of copyright notices, reverse engineering, circumvention of your own copy and write reports about anything you want to do, to use or not use the software (and to modify or not modify) at your choice, etc), but that you are not allowed to add further legal restrictions to it (with a few exceptions dealing with trademarks (but not all) and allowing conversion to GNU (A)GPL 3 and CC-BY-SA 4.0 if you are able to satisfy the conditions of those licenses) or to derivative works, and that if someone will try to use legal processes against you relating to this, then anyone can countersue.
> absolutely includes the so called viral provisions of licenses such as the GPL.
No, no it does not and rms has very specifically said that free software doesn't need to be copyleft. They even have a diagram which explicitly includes permissive licenses in the free category:
Your definition of freedom isn't different than the FSF's. You perhaps just disagree on what is necessary to safeguard that freedom and you disagree that proprietary software is unethical.
> Trying to game the system using its own axioms is not going to bring any major change, as history has shown.
The Free Software movement (and its offspring Open Source) has wrought rather major change by "gaming" the copyright / licensing system using its own axioms.
> Copyright... Not so much. That is actually useful. Open source and free software would not work without copyright law.
Not true at all. Copyleft licenses as currently written wouldn't work without copyright law; all-permissive licenses like MIT and BSD would become the default state. I'll happily take that trade, and several folks at the FSF and other FOSS organizations are on record saying the same.
> And IIRC RMS has said the same thing; that he'd be in favor of the removal of copyright over code as a concept even if it meant neutering the protections of the GPL.
Do you have a citation? I was under the impression he defended copyright because copyleft depends on it.
>Or, more specifically, they should be regulated so that non-free software licenses are illegal or severely restricted.
I think it is OK to just not have copyrights (and also not have patents). And then, there is no non-free software licenses because it is not copyright, so even if they write them they do not have any legal meaning.
Stallman's idea, that practical works you can freely use/modify/distribute/etc but artistic works it is permitted to be a limited copyright (only a few years), might also work, I think (although I am not entirely sure; I think it is probably simpler to just abolish copyright entirely).
I have also seen a suggestion to tax copyright so that you have to pay a annual tax, and can copyright it for up to ten years, but anyone who pays 100 times the tax rate of copyright can force it into the public domain early. I think that can do (and if the government likes to earn money, it can help them too), but still perhaps the copyright should not be applicable for practical works, which instead are freely usable. (Some works may be hybrid, and that is more difficult. One idea is if you can separate the parts easily enough then you can copyright the artistic parts, but if you cannot then it is forced public domain; making the source code of a computer game available may be one way to do, so that you will want to release the source codes anyways in order that you may copyright the artistic non-practical-works of them.)
But whether or not is copyright, there should be a requirement of warning label on commercial products that use DRM, and there should not be laws to restrict circumventing them on your own copies of works/devices.
> Some of the early Free Software ideologues specifically referred to copyleft as a way of using the copyright system against itself, but ultimately they would have preferred no copyright at all.
If they really preferred no copyright as an ideal, they would have created a free software license that imitates the no-copyright state as far as possible in the given system:
A license that does allow to distribute compiled code (executable binaries) without the necessity to provide the source code, but which also does not forbid any person to redistribute, modify, reverse-engineer, ... these binary files without having to ask for permission (with a virality in the latter conditions).
Perhaps such a license would also contain clauses that by using the software, you give any other user of this piece of software for any applicable software patent (to handle the situation regarding software patents, which is a topic separate from copyright, but still relevant to FOSS).
I am not aware of the existence of any such an open-source license.
> RMS has been shown to be right about his stance on freedom.
The GNU project has specifically commented on cases where using an more permissive license makes sense, one being to encourage the widespread use of a file format or standard.
I personally like copyleft quite a bit, but I don't think it makes sense for this particular case.
> Even if the community could not legally force people to play fair with open source code (by releasing modifications, not charging, or whatever the terms are), people would still continue to write it.
There was a reason I made clear to mention GPL advocates. There are differing definitions of "software freedom" that target the developers of software and the users of software.
When your political movement aims to ensure that the source code for the software that people are using is actually available and stays available then you need something like copyleft.
If your idea is instead to ensure that people are free to release source code for free if they wish, then there's not actually a battle to be had! That was how software started out after all, but that was also what led eventually to users being closed off from their source code.
> If all software was licensed that way, 5-15 years would pass then suddenly there'd be a whole bunch of "Wow, Stallman was right again! We should have been using free software licenses!" style articles.
Why do you think that would be the case? If the license doesn't achieve what the creator wanted, then they can just change it. It's not up to the greater community to decide what the best license is for other peoples projects.
It sounds like you have your own idea of what will "improve the world" and want other people to license their work to match with it.
Freedom 3 includes the freedom to release your modified
versions as free software. A free license may also
permit other ways of releasing them; in other words,
it does not have to be a copyleft license.
Do people even read this whenever they quote it? He says in it like three times that open source is the same thing as free software (and adds, parenthetically, except for very minor exceptions).
> So how exactly, does assigning copyright to the FSF make anything better for anyone? It helps the FSF, sure. But everyone else (including the author) is negatively impacted by it.
The author assigning the copyright benefits from GPL enforcement---enforcement they likely would not have the resources to do themselves.
The code is still free software; the author can continue to use it in other free software projects. Do you have a specific situation in mind where the author might want to still have copyright (aside from a matter of principle) so we can focus on that for discussion?
> If it continues to go out of fashion then that's a different issue, but watering it down doesn't help to further the causes that the FSF set out to achieve with it.
If it continues to go out of fashion, that means that it is not an effective means of furthering the cause ths FSF set out to achieve for it.
One can agree with what the FSF overtly claims its goals to be, without believing that the current form of the GPL is particularly an effective method at achieving those goals in the current environment (one might even believe that the basic approach of the GPL was the most effective approach for an earlier time with different circumstances, without believing that it is effective now.)
It may be the case that compelling very specific rules for software freedom if a package is used isn't actually the most effective way, in practice, of promoting software freedom.
It would certainly not be helpful to the implementation of the philosophy of the part of the Free Software movement (which includes RMS) that wants to prevent non-free software from being created to the extent possible.
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