Comment by inlined

21 hours ago

As a user I suffer from not being able to freely use or derive my own work from Microsoft’s

This. People conflate consumer to user. A user in the sense of GPL is a programmer or technical person whom the software (including source) is intended for.

Not necessarily a “user of an app” but a user of this “suite of source code”.

  • Except really the whole point is it explicitly and actively makes no distinction. Every random user has 100% of the same rights as any developer or vendor.

    • A completely level playing field. There's probably never been a more perfect free market than that in free software.

      It turns out that most people who say that value free market capitalism never really did.

At this point they've contributed a reasonably-fair share of open-source code themselves.

No one benefits from locking up 99.999% of all source code, including most of Microsoft's proprietary code and all GPL code.

No one.

When it comes to AI, the only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism is that humans will have to waste their time writing the same old shit, over and over, forever less one day [1], because muh copyright!!!1!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

  • > only foreseeable outcome to copyright maximalism

    Nahh, AI companies had plenty of money to pay for access they simply chose not to.

    • Clearing those rights, which don't actually exist yet, would have been utterly impossible for any amount of money. Thousands of lawyers would tie up the process in red tape until the end of time.

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