Oh please... Save the wild eyed ranting, or at least bring RMS along to do some chanting while wearing an old 14-inch CDC platter on his head. (as seen by yours truely at SVLUG back in the mid 90's...)

You can't have change without breaking a little glass. I'm just pointing out that every time you hear about an open source "win" , someone else likely had to "loose". How the winning and loosing is structured is what counts. One way is a surefire way to build an economy, another... We don't know yet. There appears to be some money to be made in OSS, but the transition I've been thru personally was kind of rough, and my company is one of the biggest contributors of OSS code.



Yea... Linux written to conform to POSIX is soooo original.


The problem is IP law, specifically Copyright. Why on earth do we allow 100 year copyrights? More to the point, why on earth do we shoehorn software, which is both published material AND a functional device into a publishing IP model? It doesn't fit. The useful life of software is so short, it doesn't make sense. Short term perhaps, but why should the original Fortran compiler be copyrighted for the next 40 years? There probably isn't any hardware left to run it on, and if there was, who'd derive any commercial value from it? Therefore, it offers no incentive to its authors to create new works. (Ignoring the fact that they're likely all dead...) That's the point of copyright, to provide incentive for more works.


What I see with OSS is copyright enclosing vast swaths of property, and incenting cloning and duplication as an end run around. We need a more flexible tiered copyright mechanism. I'd even be ammenable to some kind of perpetual copyright if it contained a strong mechanism to compensate the loss to the public domain. Say a renewal tax/fee as a percentage of a property's revenue. That way the big movie studios could keep making money off Gone With The Wind, and Steamboat WIllie, while economically sensable to do so, and other works won't rot in archives. With a 28 year copyright, Unix would be free right now, and Linus wouldn't have needed to clone it.