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by eesmith 789 days ago
Open source is largely based on "property". Very few open source projects are in the public domain. The FOSS developers I know have a higher respect for those licenses than capitalist corporate users, who seem to treat FOSS licenses with contempt by not following all the terms.

Your lists of points seem also applicable to capitalism.

  - ignore property rights if the fines are cheaper than the profits
  - capitalism both enables people and greatly enriches the most powerful
  - ask the Luddites about how to destroy the economics of production
  - "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see
      themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily
      embarrassed millionaire." (famous quote derived from Steinbeck)
1 comments
CRConrad 789 days ago
> Very few open source projects are in the public domain.

Software in the public domain kind of by definition can't be open source. Not for more than a fleeting instant: You can take it and use it, and so can anyone -- and immediately make it closed source.

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fanf2 789 days ago
You can say the same thing about any non-copyleft BSD/MIT/ISC-style licence.
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CRConrad 789 days ago
Yup. And I think I have. :-)
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eesmith 788 days ago
The argument is that open source is based on "contempt for property."

Yet most open source projects use a license based on copyright, and copyright is generally considered part of "intellectual property" as it draws from property ownership as its model.

Without strong copyright, there is no effective GPL.

I therefore do not see any connection between open source and contempt for property. Certainly less contempt than I see from capitalist corporations which use open source components in proprietary products and in violation of the license terms.

As for your "kind of by definition can't be open source", I'll kindly direct you to a counter-example at https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html which includes both "SQLite Is Public Domain" and "SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation."

You'll find very few people who argue or believe that SQLite is not open source.

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