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  From: Alan Kennington <ak1.linuxsa@topology.org>
  To  : LinuxSA <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 13:24:47 +0930

Re: bsd- easier than you think

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 12:57:53PM +0930, Angus Wallace wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, no -- A park or a hospital is a philanthropic gift to be 
> > enjoyed for the future.  
> > 
> > You can hardly call it philanthorpy when you're saying, "Sure, use
> > this, but if you carry out certain behaviours you'll be obligated
> > to give some of your stuff back to me."
> > 
> > I've never heard of anyone in a park funded by a philanthropist 
> > being required to share their picnic with the millionaire;  Have
> > you?
> 
> But I'm sure the philanthropost would be pissed if someone put fences 
> around their gift and then charged an entry fee to everyone else...


Angus,

I think the missing information here is:
Software is a design, not a thing.
The analogy of the park is not good, admittedly.

A better analogy might be the discovery of a cure for a disease or
a more efficient house design.
If these ideas are put into the public domain in the spirit of
academic publication of research (which, of course, is greatly hated
by governments now, who want to cook the golden goose), then
certainly some people will charge for providing medicines or for
building houses using the design idea.

Perhaps a clearer analogy might be with a variety of rice which has been
earning good incomes for Indians, and then a rich country patents a
slightly modified variety and prevents the traditional farmers from
exporting the original variety to the rich country. Now that would
be annoying!

You can't own a design in the same way as you can
own a house. It's only our crazy legal environment which tries to pretend
that there is such a thing as "intellectual property".
It is a complete fabrication and an insult to the rational mind.

Since the GPL is a response to the crazy concept of "intellectual property",
it's not surprising that the GPL is full of nonsense. I think that the GPL
can be forgiven for its failings, given that it is up against such a 
crazy distortion of reality.

Cheers again...

Alan.

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