Comment by wpietri
1 year ago
And I think those conversations are worth listening to. Do we want a society where people release a lot of open-source code? Or do we want one where people get tired of doing free labor for greedy jerks, and so stop releasing things openly?
Civilization runs on politeness and other things that flow not from our current laws but from respect for others. We ignore that at our peril.
We're not talking about open source code. We are talking about the MIT license.
The two are not the same.
As long as we're nit-picking, we're talking about the Apache license.
But my point isn't about the specific license. It's about one set of people very generously doing lots of labor and publishing the result in hopes of making the world a little better. And then some other people exploiting that for personal gain with no regard for the first group.
That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. For example, Gutenberg enabled the creation of the publishing industry. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain. That moral problem is why copyright was considered important enough to put into the constitution. [1]
Focusing on the specific text of a specific license is missing the point. Both my point and the point of this article, which is why YC is taking heat for backing these guys.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-1/...
>That's a social dynamic that's at the heart of IP laws. Pirate book publishers saw a way to make some money by exploiting the labor of authors and original publishers for their own gain.
This is a _gross_ misunderstanding of what publishing was like in the first few centuries of the printing press.
Copyright laws originated as a form of government censorship and control over the printing press in 15th-16th century Europe. Governments and religious authorities sought to regulate the spread of information by granting exclusive printing privileges to select printers. This allowed them to censor and control what content was published.
It was only when the people who were censored won that copyright was invented to keep them from killing everyone involved.
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