[pydry]

>Patents are a pertect example of something that did make sense back when they were made.

Their function was always to create more property to capitalize. I'm not sure you could argue that this wasnt the intended effect. The idea that they ever spurred innovation was the "big lie".

There have been historical periods of explosive innovation that coincided with lax or no enforcement of intellectual property rules but never, as far as im aware, the reverse.

[jcims]

The same thing could be said for software licensing, couldn’t it?

[GuB-42]

No GPL without software licensing. And no Linux without GPL.

By requiring the source to be available with the software, licenses drove the free software movement.

[pydry]

GPL also wouldnt be needed without software licensing.

No reason Linux couldnt exist. All software would effectively be FOSS by default.

[GuB-42]

Free but not open source.

GPL is here to make sure the source code doesn't stay secret, and it is an essential part of the Linux development process, the driver model in particular. In fact, I don't see how a community driven, widely supported, monolithic kernel could be made without a copyleft license.

Linux without GPL wouldn't be Linux, and out of the free OSes (BSD, GNU/HURD, Haiku, Minix, ...), Linux is the most successful.

[pydry]

If every employee of your company were able to take and release your source code anyway the GPL couldnt really make things more open.