Jim Choate (ravage@ssz.com) wrote:
So do I, and I bet both our incomes combined doesn't add up to 15 minutes of Bill G's and it won't.
Of course not, because Bill has jackbooted copyright enforcers to subsidise his corporation. Without them his income would be dramatically reduced.
From a market perspective we're flies on the back of great elephant. Please be so kind as to describe how and why this marketing mechanism (copyleft) will succed?
Uh, I said copyright should be abolished, you said noone would write software, I said that Linux disproved that claim. How is this relevant to that discussion? Of course it's not going to take over when companies can get billions of dollars of subsidies in the form of copyright enforcement, but it clearly shows that without copyright people will produce better software than Microsfot has ever written.
I've been using and supporting Linux since 1993 (SSZ is listed as a source site in the back of 'Running Linux' since day one) in this manner neither I or anyone else has gotten rich.
Exactly. So tell us how Bill would have become a billionaire without copyright?
It's copyrighted in the important sense in that it uses the copyright to enforce its conditions. That is just as important as the marketing decisions made by it.
All it enforces is source-code distribution (and I've yet to hear of a single case where it's ever been used). That's important to the developers, but not to the average user. The situation would be little changed in a world with no copyright, because if anyone did try to keep their source secret anyone who got a copy could freely distribute it. I'm truly amazed to find all these pro-copyright views on the list, when cypherpunks have been at the forefront of creating technologies to make it unenforceable and obsolete. Mark