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Comment by akersten | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to take a moment to be grateful for the small graces of the current copyright climate that allow projects like this to exist. If the parameters of a few lines of US Code were slightly tweaked, or a few court rulings different, we'd simply not have this amazing feat of interoperability available.

It's really an amazing thing that we're able to foster projects like this in the open, and we should be careful to preserve those freedoms.

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Yes, and it makes you wonder what other amazing things we're missing out on, but for some quirk of law or successful lobbying.

> Yes, and it makes you wonder what other amazing things we're missing out on, but for some quirk of law or successful lobbying.

A few simplified examples from off the top of my head:

pre ww2 most employers didn't provide insurance. during ww2 healthcare was offered as a perk of the job back in the day because wage freezes caused by world war 2 inflation concerns. you can say that because of hitler that it is the way it is now and now there is a huge political donation machinery to prevent single payer health care.(downsides being that if you are rich you can get really good healthcare for less than you'd pay into a single payer system and there are millions of jobs related to the bureaucracy of being in the middle of provider and patient)

china has very lax copyright/patent enforcement and as such places like shenzen's markets where you can find thousands of little electronic bits and pieces and clones are rampant with a very large maker movement. (of course there is a downside to this in that the capitalists don't get to benefit as much on whatever innovation was there originally)

regulatory capture on other industries are also from that lobbying.

I find it interesting how large the maker movement is in China despite the very lax copyright. It simply has no or net positive effect, it would seem. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I think the general argument against relaxing copyright protections, at least the most common I've heard, is precisely that.

Because they are lax on foreign copyrights and not domestic ones?

Do you have any evidence for that claim?

It's not a claim but a rhetorical question, hence the question mark...

A rhetorical question is a question asked to make a point, rather than get an answer.[1] A point, aka a claim here.

But maybe you meant a non-rhetorical question. In which case, it would be clearer if you started it with a "Maybe" - if your intent was to genuinely ask it as a question.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topics/zmfc7ty/articles/z7dyv...

The downside is that whatever you can find to buy is ripped off from whoever invented it, usually neglecting rudiments of quality control.

Has this ever been tested? If Linux can decide license requirements for modules that implement their apis, I’m not so sure Microsoft couldn’t block Wine if they really wanted.

The license in Linux case is for distributing Linux (and the module). You can create modules with whatever license you'd like if you're not distributing your work. In Wine's case you're not distributing Windows so it's not the same.

A more similar case would be Oracle vs. Google over the Java API.

> if you're not distributing your work

That’s not true either. There’s no such distinction. A program using a GPL library (such as the kernel) is considered as a derivative work according to the FSF.

Canonical legal (for ZFS) decided that distributing a non-GPL module is fine, as did NVIDIA for their GPU drivers.

If the GPL is considered as enforceable on that front (which was _not_ tested), a lot of things would change.

I thought some of the modules are checked for licence field prior to loading them. You could modify that if you keep the whole internal

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