Re: Economics and the GP

At 10:30 PM 6/14/02 -0400, Deven T. Corzine wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Jun 2002, Matt Seitz wrote:
>
> > RMS and the FSF have repeatedly stated that they support reducing the
> > length of copyright*.  I imagine the reason they do not time-limit the
> > GPL is that they do not want to unilaterally weaken the GPL and give an
> > advantage to proprietary code.
>
>This is reasonable, but if they DID unilaterally take that step, and make
>the GPL "expire" after maybe 10 years (or whatever copyright term they'd
>recommend), and if it fails to harm the growth of the GPL community, they
>could point to that as evidence of how it would similarly fail to harm the
>fortunes of proprietary, commercial companies much either...
>
>Nothing like a little proof by example, right?

I think you don't understand a main point. The copyright is not restricted 
NOT because people are not convinced, but because there are COMMERCIAL 
INTERESTS that want to maintain the copyright. Convincing anyone won't make 
a difference. As long as there can be gained money by maintaining Copyright 
there will always be lobbies fighting for it. Its the same with expelling 
lots of pollution in the air. The industrial pollution is not reduced 
because there are strong commercial interests that want otherwise, the same 
goes for killing the wales, etc...etc....

Roland