[denton-scratch]

I used to work as a computer programmer until I retired. Nearly always, my work was part of a collaborative effort, and latterly didn't include any copyright claim. My income was never impacted by unauthorized copying. Until the 80s, there was no copyright on software, and yet even then people made a living programming.

Craftsmen don't claim copyright on their artifacts. Furniture designs were widely copied; but Chippendale did alright for himself. Gardeners at stately homes didn't rely on copyright. Vergil, Plato and Aristotle managed OK without copyright. People made a living composing music, songs and poetry before the idea of copyright was invented. Truck-drivers make a living; driving a truck is hardly a performance art. Labourers and factory workers get by successfully. Accountants and legal advocates get rich without copyright.

None of these trades amounts to "performance arts".

[tsimionescu]

I very much doubt the company or foundation you were working for was selling the non-copyrighted software. If it was, it probably only worked on very specific hardware that you also produced and were selling, and thus copying it was largely useless. If you were working for a university, than the university obviously doesn't make money from selling software, and thus doesn't care for copyright as much.

Also, craftsmen rely on the fact that the part of their work that can't be easily copied, the physical artifact they produce, is most of the value (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often). Similarly for gardeners. The ancient greek writers were again paid for performance, typically as teachers. Literature was once quite a performative act. And again, at that time, physical copies of writings were greatly valuable artifacts, not that much different from the value of the writing itself, since copying large texts was so hard.

Similarly, the work of drivers, labourers, factory workers, accountants is valuable in itself and very hard or impossible to copy (again, the physical world is the ultimate copyright protection). The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted, but even when it's not, it's not applicable to others' cases, so copies of it are not valuable: no one is making a business that replaces lawyers by re-distributing affidavits.

[denton-scratch]

> I very much doubt the company [...] was selling the non-copyrighted software

Well you'd be mistaken. Lately, it was custom software, for a particular client, and of no interest to others. Earlier, it was before software copyright was a thing, and computer manufacturers gave software away to sell the hardware.

At the very beginning, yes, it was "very specific" hardware; it was Burroughs hardware, which used Burroughs processors. But that was before microprocessors, and all hardware was "very specific".

> (plus they rely on trademark laws and design patents quite often)

Craftsmen and labourers were earning a living long before anyone had the idea of a "trademark", still less a "design patent".

> The output of lawyers is in fact sometimes copyrighted

You're right. That's why I didn't say "lawyers", I said "legal advocates". Those are people who speak on your behalf in courts of law, not scribes writing contracts. Anyway, the ancient Greeks and Romans had written laws, contracts and so on; they managed without trademarks and copyrights.

[tsimionescu]

> Well you'd be mistaken. Lately, it was custom software, for a particular client, and of no interest to others. Earlier, it was before software copyright was a thing, and computer manufacturers gave software away to sell the hardware.

Then I am not mistaken: the company was initially selling hardware, with the software being just a value add as you say (no copyright: no interest in trying to sell, exactly my point). Then, you were being paid for building software that (a) was probably not being made public anyway, and (b) would not have been of interest to others even if it were.

Even so, if someone came to your client and offered to take on the software maintenance for a much lower price, you might have lost your client entirely. This has very much happened to contractors in the past.

And my point is you couldn't have a Microsoft or Adobe or possibly even RedHat if you didn't have copyright protecting their business. So, you'd probably not have virtually any kind of consumer software.

[denton-scratch]

> offered to take on the software maintenance for a much lower price

We didn't charge maintenance for this software. We would write it to close the sale of a computer. It was treated as "cost of sale". I'm sure it was cheaper (to us) than the various discounts and kickbacks that happened in big mainframe deals.

As far as Microsoft and Adobe is concerned, I wouldn't regard it as a misfortune if they had never existed. I'm not convinced that RedHat's existence is contingent on copyright.