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by einpoklum 1453 days ago
> Should I be disallowed to commercialise it?

I believe you are mis-phrasing the question. What you're actually asking is:

> Should the state criminalize and punish people who make copies of my work, to facilitate my commercial activity with it?

And our answer is "No".

You can go ahead and engage in whatever commercial activity you like, based on open access to your work.
2 comments
zasdffaa 1453 days ago
That's a constructive answer, so thanks, although I have to ask your view of how BSD was used by apple to build a massive fortune but without paying significantly back to the BSD community.

Overheard from an IP lawyer I stood near to once - something about f/oss software being incorporated into commercial products being a big issue (for the free stuff, not the company doing the 'stealing' of it). Your view?

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rakoo 1453 days ago
This is the exact reason why copyleft licenses are important: you can reuse (A)GPL content, but if you do so the result must be given back to the community. If you're not going to pay anything, at least your product benefits everyone
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zasdffaa 1453 days ago
The point is the licenses are irrelevant: The IP lawyer said they take quietly, they incorporate it into their products which they sell.

the licences are being ignored. It's what she said.

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rakoo 1453 days ago
BSD content can be taken without contributing back, it's in the license. Copyleft content cannot. That's the main difference, and even Google doesn't want to touch copyleft content with a 10-foot pole because of the fear they'd have to share their internal sauce, so I presume companies still take licenses into account.
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zasdffaa 1453 days ago
Stop ignoring what I said. It's not about BSD licenses it's about more restrictive ones

You:

> This is the exact reason why copyleft licenses are important: you can reuse (A)GPL content, but if you do so the result must be given back to the community

Me: the frigging licences are being ignored. Giving back to the community is not happening. Code is being stolen. Are you trying to ignore what's being said?

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shrimp_emoji 1452 days ago
>BSD was used by apple to build a massive fortune but without paying significantly back to the BSD community.

Welcome to free software. :)

If you had to "pay back significantly" to use it, it would not be "free software".

It's regrettable, but it's the price of freedom. Whether that's worth it is subjective. Stallman's answer to this was the GPL. (I bet Apple wouldn't've touched BSD if it was GPL'd.) Newer, hybrid license have also emerged (like the MPL) that attempt to strike a better balance between freedom and back-contributions.

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account42 1453 days ago
The way I see it the problem in both cases here is that the company is using stuff created by others but not giving the same freedom to users of ther derived work.

Without copyright this situation is a lot more equalized as now you can have people make modified versions of macOS and redistribute those legally - yes, not having source access makes that more difficult, but not impossible and even if you did need the source, it only has to leak once.

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worldshit 1453 days ago
> based on open access to your work

Can I freely use your toilet then? your electricity? You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment?

Scientific knowledge must be open, but most copyrighted work is entertainment.

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klez 1453 days ago
> Can I freely use your toilet then? your electricity?

No because once you used them I don't have them anymore. There's a reason IP has different rules than physical property.

> You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment?

Ok, that's a more appropriate analogy, but then again, should my plumber get a recurring fee for the work they already did, when I use the faucet to give drinks to my friends?

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worldshit 1453 days ago
> No because once you used them I don't have them anymore.

I mean entering your house, doing my business in your toilet and leave. I won't take your toilet with me, I'll come back when I need it again.

> when I use the faucet to give drinks to my friends?

But your friends all have their own house with their own plumbing they paid him for, so he can continue making a living from his craft. Writing a book takes months or years, not 2 hours like repairing a toilet, so of course the author needs to ask for money from everyone who wants to access it.

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klez 1453 days ago
> I mean entering your house, doing my business in your toilet and leave. I won't take your toilet with me, I'll come back when I need it again

We're moving the goalpost here. And we're still talking about physical property (or possession) vs. intellectual property. I suggest we stop with that line of reasoning/metaphor.

> But your friends all have their own house with their own plumbing they paid him for, so he can continue making a living from his craft.

Again, the metaphor does not hold. Such a situation only means that the plumber is the only plumber in town. If we have multiple plumbers (so we can stick to the metaphor) my plumber can't forbid me to use my plumbing for certain uses (like watering my plants or offering water to my friends for free or for a fee).

> Writing a book takes months or years, not 2 hours like repairing a toilet, so of course the author needs to ask for money from everyone who wants to access it.

So it's just a quantitative difference? I can pay 1 cent per 1000 toilet flushes then. Seems fair.

My point is, I think these kind of metaphors don't work here precisely because intellectual work is its own thing.

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account42 1453 days ago
> I mean entering your house, doing my business in your toilet and leave. I won't take your toilet with me, I'll come back when I need it again.

If your use of my toilet doesn't affect me in anyway then I don't see why I should have a problem with that. If we are talking about you stinking up the place, using all my toilet paper and blocking the john whenever I need to go then we are talking about something very different from "IP".

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einpoklum 1452 days ago
> Can I freely use your toilet then?

You can freely use the design of my toilet, certainly.

> You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment?

I pay for physical objects that are made for me, like books; and I pay when people come play their music (even if payment is not mandatory).

But TBH - I don't think that's the appropriate moral basis for things. For example, we don't pay for the huge amount of work our parents do for us; nor for the not-for-profit activities we often rely on etc. I would much rather support a non-exchange-based social arrangement.

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