Re: Economics and the GPL
Joerg Mayer <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.emulators.wine.license |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 04:19:22PM -0700, Matt Seitz wrote:
> Fortunately, there is a solution that could make both the FSF and commercial
> developers happy. The key is the power of copyright. The GPL is only as
> strong as copyright law. What if the copyright law was changed so that
> software could only be copyrighted for, say, five years? Once the copyright
> expires, the GPL is moot. Any company could take the code and use it to
> produce a commercial product, without having to distribute any of their source
> code.
5 Years is a very long time. Would you want to use a 5 year old gcc or linux
desktop or linux kernel? I don't think so. In most cases, having to redo the
work of 5 years of softwaredevelopment in order to develop a competitive
product looks quite hard. A 5 year copyright only means, that code that
hasn't been touched for 5 years.
OTOH, it would still be quite nice to be explicitely allowed to decompile
Win97 right now or legally copy old console games.
Ciao
Jörg
--
Joerg Mayer <[email protected]>
I found out that "pro" means "instead of" (as in proconsul). Now I know
what proactive means.