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Comment by mwfunk | Hacker News Reader

Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright, because it's the only thing that gives the GPL any meaning at all. In a copyright-free world, any company could make a proprietary GCC fork, lock its code up behind many layers of physical and digital security, make all its developers/employees sign NDAs and other legal agreements ensuring they don't leak any of the new code, et voila. Hardly sounds like a Free Software utopia.

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> Free Software enthusiasts can't advocate against copyright

You're right that we can't advocate for just eliminating copyright, without shooting ourselves in the foot. However, eliminating copyright, combined with, say, an obligation of software companies to disclose the source code of their "products" to their customers, or, less intrusively, with making the type of NDAs you describe illegal, would work.

More generally it comes back to the right to repair. We operate in this perverse economy where we lack a meaningful right to repair in the digital age because understanding on the subject is so scarce, but I personally believe in a strong consumer right to repair, and in a post-IP world that would include a requirement to disclose source of software - in practical terms, so the owner of the tractor can fix bugs in the tractors computer, but in general so anyone purchasing software - or just goods of any kind - should have the right to understand what it is and how it works.

Its one of the defined software freedoms of the FSF, after all, and its fundamentally why software freedom is advocated for, but it absolutely doesn't need copyright to be enshrined in law.

On the other hand, in a copyright-free world once a leak happens (and they inevitably do), everybody in the world would be legally free to use that code. There would be some liability for the developer breaking the NDA or for the hacker stealing that code, but in the absence of copyright the buck stops there and all the other seven billion people in the world would not be bound by these legal issues.

My personal take on it is that in practice software liberation is more akin to the right to repair than to a need for intellectual property.

We currently have both a draconian IP regime and woefully inadequate right to repair, but fixing the latter does absolve free software from needing the former to function.

The way I see it free Software enthusiasts who advocate against copyright believes that without the ability to derive rent from copyright, companies will just release the code in hope for contributions. Rent seeking is thus seen by this group as the biggest reason why companies keep software strict proprietary, and it is a fair trade to give up on GPL if we could remove the rent seeking. In this scenario, EULA and other contract-like mechanics to replicate copyright would equally not be allowed, and right to repair addresses most issue around DRM in this context.

It is a very different strategy than GPL, and doesn't look very likely to happen given the trend in both EU and US, but I see it as a valid long shot strategy. It would be a terrible strategy however if we gave up GPL without anything in return.

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