On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 04:37:44PM +0100, Thomas Quinot wrote: TQ> This is a very common misconception. Free Software is in fact all TQ> about asserting and maintaining property rights. The reason why the TQ> GPL can exist is because society has established the rules of TQ> property and copyright, and allows an individual to determine which TQ> rights on his property he is willing to grant to others, and under TQ> which conditions. TQ> TQ> Property is the very fundation that guarantees that GPL'd software TQ> remains free. Without property, copyright, and law and a judicial TQ> system to enforce them, there is no free software anymore.
That is a very common misconception :) At the very least, in contradicts with views of GPL inventors, the FSF. 1) The very maxim 'copyleft: all rights reversed' is directed against the copyright: instead of limiting one's right to copy, it mandates it. 2) As I've already pointed out, GPL destroys notion of intellectual property to replace it with possession. 3) Free software remains free not with help of property and judicial system, but in spite of them: GPL is a clever trick that protects free software from intellectual property by hanging so tightly to the copyright that it becomes impossible to break GPL without breaking copyright. But without copyright, GPL is not broken, it is just unnecessary, which draws me to the next point. 4) It is of no coincidence that there wasn't any precedent yet of GPL enforcement via court order. It is just not necessary, because the most valuable thing in free software is not the software itself, but a community behind it, because software is a service, not a product, and it loses value without support, and any company considering violating GPL soon finds that costs of being cut off from community support exceed profits of having proprietary free software derivative. 5) Finally, the only way for the said company to reap the profits of proprietary software would be to persecute anyone who attempts to excercise their right to freely copy, use, and modify their software, and GPL makes such persecution impossible: as I've already said, it protects from, not builds upon, intellectual property and copyright. -- Dmitry Borodaenko
