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[ox-en] Re: Property, scarcity, selbstentfaltung



Hi MJ and list!

Thanks for your thoughts. I'll put my (Euro)-Cent in, but I feel this
should be thought about more.

Last week (8 days ago) MJ Ray wrote:
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
Free Software uses this feature of digital copy but goes one step
further - and IMHO the crucial one. Especially the GPL fundamentally
gives up the property rights on an information product. A GPLed piece
of information is basically the property of anyone - which makes the
term useless regarding the option of excluding anyone. [snip!]

I think this is not true.

I think it's at least true for the current practice. But you're right
when looking at some extreme cases.

The GPL merely changes the flow of information
from being dictated to by the copyright holder, to being dictated by the
copyright licensee.  As a licensee, you are free to give the copyrighted
material to anyone.

I think you can treat the copyright holder the same as a licensee for
this question.

In all free software licences, you are also free to not
give the copyrighted material to anyone.  Nothing forces *you* personally to
include anyone.  It's a sort of self-determination for copyright licensees.

AFAIK an Apple license forces you to return your modifications to the
public IIRC.

However, this probably makes it less likely that someone will be excluded,
as instead of depending on the wishes of one person, it depends on all
licensees wanting to exclude them.

Yes. This is what happens in practice.

At the start of the life of a work,
though, it is only held by one person.

Well, in both cases - proprietary licenses and GPL - you can think
about the case where the copyright holder doesn't give the piece of
work to anyone. In this case the whole argument doesn't apply very
much. Or to put it the other way: Everyone is excluded to use the
work except for the copyright holder.

In this extreme case a proprietary license and the GPL actually have
the same effects: None. In this case it makes no sense thinking about
licenses at all because a license is a piece of regulation meant
exactly for giving something to someone else. So I'd conclude we
safely can ignore this case.

Even though it is licensed under the
GPL, how they choose who to license it to will determine how much it costs.
This can be seen by GPL "sell-offs".  The NaN Blender one is probably the
most public so far.  Reaction to that has been very mixed, though.

I think the Blender case is a bad example because a lot of people are
interested in Blender. So as soon as NaN chooses to release it under
the GPL to anyone it is quite likely that this person will make it
available to the general public - even if NaN did not intended that
(but I guess they know what they are doing ;-) ). That follows from -
as you correctly said - that the licensee has the rights.

A more interesting example is the class of Free Software written on
base of a contract. In this case neither the copyright holder nor the
licensee (i.e. the customer) may be interested in making it publicly
available. But then - why bother putting it under the GPL in the first
place? If later one of both parties makes another decision the license
is important again.

The GPL does not "give up" or "abandon" property rights.

Well, it abandons control over the work once it has been given away to
someone else. In some sense this is more analogous to what happens for
property transfers of material goods: You have the right to do
anything you like with (material) goods being your property. This
includes the option to exclude others.

Hey, seeing it this way the GPL is actually the best analogy to
property rights on material things! Seeing it this way the GPL
*creates* classical property rights. Interesting!! Wonder whether
Stallman ever thought of that.

It merely tries to
use them in a particular way, to try to encourage progress in programming,
like most copyright laws were intended to do for creativity.

That is the Open Source Initiative view on it. Saying it in Oekonux
words they say: Open Source is the best way to do it so this should be
the way it is done. Stallman has a different approach here.

So, I refuse to accept the above reasoning as an justification for saying
"free software is gratis".

I'm not saying this in general. Particularly Free Software written for
a contract is an exception. However, for a big class of software in
practice this is the case.

Would you like to refine and retry?

Done.

You may
well be right, or I currently suspect it may just be that most free software
has a price below what is worth collecting because there is no scarcity.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/



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