[CraigJPerry]

You’re talking about intangible assets. For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy. When you’ve sold your licence to use the software, the software is effectively gone. It’s not always as simple as that. E.g. my brand is an intangible asset.

>> If I make a painting

That’s just a regular asset, once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one.

[franciscop]

> For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy.

I can assure you I didn't have to issue manual licenses or make manual copies for the millions of downloads that my open source software had this year. When someone downloaded it, no one found it missing from their project.

> once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one

Hence is not zero-sum, I can keep making them and the amount of assets keep increasing (non-zero sum). Zero-sum means that "whatever is gained by one side is lost by the other." By creating a new painting nothing is lost.

[CraigJPerry]

>> I can assure you I didn't have to issue

You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.

Maybe you didn’t specify a licence, depending on your jurisdiction then perhaps the work is classed public domain automatically or more likely you’ve created a situation where technically your users are breaching your copyright.

>> I can keep making them

Sure, you can exchange some assets (paint, a canvas) and your labour to make a new asset (a painting).

>> By creating a new painting nothing is lost.

You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.

[franciscop]

> You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.

I mean I didn't manually make each license, it's COPIED without nothing being removed from me. I can copy it once or a million times, nothing is removed and value is added, hence non-zero sum.

> You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.

No, it's not the same, a painting has more value than the paint and canvas; hence not-zero sum. It's ridiculous to claim zero sum, that'd imply we cannot advance as a species and would still be dealing with pebbles.

[CraigJPerry]

>> I mean I didn't manually

Manually or automatically issuing is insignificant. Your work was automatically copyrighted when you wrote it, if you did nothing else - such as agreeing to exchange those rights for a salary from an employer, or declaring the software as licenced under specific terms, or performing the necessary actions in your jurisdiction to enter the works into the public domain, if you did none of these, then it’s yours to claim as an asset if you want.

>> nothing is removed and value is added

No asset was removed - ownership of the copyright of the software still remains unchanged when people copied your open source software.

However, no new asset was created. They derived value from your software hopefully but they didn’t gain a new asset.

What if you licenced it under a really permissive licence like apache? It’s still the same story. someone else can create their own asset by changing your apache licenced software and distributing it as theirs. They’re in breach of that particular licence if they try to redistribute completely unchanged work under a different licence.

>> a painting has more value than the paint and canvas

You’re conflating valuation with accounting. The value of an asset is a different and often subjective concern, from the accounting of ownership of it.

A painting has more value than it’s raw materials (hopefully!), but that tells us nothing about how to account for ownership of the asset.

If i have a case of beers that i bought for $50 and i take it to the beach and sell it for $100 to a group of thirsty friends, the valuation changed but the chain of custody of the asset was zero sum all through.