On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 9:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Sun, 10 Jun 2018 13:36:34 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: > >>> That's all speculation. It's impossible to say how things would have >>> turned out if copyrights didn't apply to software. Certainly different, >>> but not necessarily worse. >>> >>> In the early days, computer manufacturers didn't worry about people >>> copying their software, because it was no use without the hardware, and >>> selling hardware was how they made their money. There's no reason that >>> business model couldn't have continued into the PC era. >>> >>> >> It would have meant that third-party software would not exist. > > Says the fellow using a free mail server (funded by advertising) on a > free OS (funded by donations) on a free mailing list about a free > programming language :-) > > Lack of copyright for software would not affect software-as-a-service > like Gmail. It would not affect FOSS licences like the MIT and BSD > licence, although it might declaw the GPL.
I'm not sure that these kinds of concepts would even exist, though. If the business model had always been "sell hardware, it comes fully programmed", what would bring people to try to create third-party software at all? It's easy to look back NOW and say "even if software had no copyright, this could still exist". It's not so easy to see that such things would have come about. We live today in a world of massive cross-compatibility and third-party software creations, where your "computer" may have many different manufacturers and many different software authors, all happily running together. While IBM did create hardware compatibility standards (allowing other manufacturers to create fully-compatible expansion cards etc) as a viable commercial decision, I doubt very much that anyone other than hobbyists would write software that they're unable to sell. Don't forget that "software-as-a-service" is an extremely young concept; to be a saleable form of software (as opposed to a saleable service involving both hardware and software), it depends on people having the clients AND a means of connecting to the servers - which today means web browsers and internet connections. Possibly the oldest "SaaS" concept for computers would be a dial-in BBS. Would that sort of thing exist if copyright did not? I'm not sure. Maybe it would, but it's certainly not "oh well saas wouldn't be affected by this". I'm also not sure that the MIT and BSD licenses would still be viable. Without copyright, they have no teeth, which would mean that their license terms of "don't sue me if it doesn't work" wouldn't apply. IANAL, but I'm fairly sure that those terms are in the licenses for good reason. The GPL, which has much stronger requirements, would be completely powerless. "Not affect" is far FAR too broad. Open source still depends on copyright. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
