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by oefnak 1806 days ago
Yes, sure. Without copyright there's no need for copyleft left, right?
2 comments

No...? Not unless that closed-source project's source code is leaked?
You don't care about attribution and other moral rights ?

(I guess these are going to depend a LOT on the jurisdiction that you're in ?)

I care, but in the long run, I care more about our descendants not having tools locked out of their hands. Facilitated information asymmetry is the root of far too many evils.

Where is your ego when you're dead and gone? Where could we be if the majority of human advancement we're not tightly clutched as trade secrets?

As someone who has done paid software engineering (yes, you can feel free to call me a hack or sell out if you wish), I've come to find that the salary I've pulled over the years has not gone to me... But keeping a roof over those I love, helping other people's projects grow, giving people a shot, etc.

My time on the other hand, gets dumped into implementing the same handful of processes doing the same damn thing, but different this time, because you can't just bloody make "Here ya go, here's your Enterprise-in-a-box".

I'd like people more people able to solve novel problems than necessarily need to retread the same path over and over. Some degree of that will always have to be done to keep the skills fresh in the population, but we could do way better at marshaling that split, and I'm convinced part of what necessitates it is creating artificial barriers through things like enforced implementation monopolization. Yes. It ensures a minimum level of novelty and variance across populations, but it also does terribly at not consuming the finite amount of human capacity for truly novel thought to innovate.

It may make societies that function based on greed and economic/fiscal measures work, but I'm not convinced other incentive structures won't keep the rolling stone of innovation from accruing moss.

I don't understand what you're talking about, I'm talking about the non-commercial parts of the monopoly rights that are copyrights and patents, the non-commercial parts arguably aren't going to restrict the users much, and their commercial parts are temporary by design.

(Copyright has went IMHO overboard with its duration, we should scale to back to the original 14 years renewable once, just like patents, but copyright doesn't apply to processes anyway, and so arguably it shouldn't apply to software that can't claim to have any artistic merit.)