Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

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Problem: People are writing bad software with bugs and dark patterns.

Solution: Software development should be the only creative profession in the entire world with no legal protection on their work!?

It's insane to me. Absolutely insane. Copyright is not immoral. Almost nobody in this thread would be able to make any money as a software engineer if software were not allowed to make money. And yes, I've heard the arguments for how free software could kinda maybe carve out a niche of funding and keep a few passionate people employed for not quite enough money. Spare me. It's like every aerospace engineer deciding that what they're doing is immoral and they should all just be aircraft maintenance techs. It's a completely different, much less creative, and much less satisfying job (for the engineering-minded, anyway).

Of course patents are a different story, and basically are immoral under the current system. And there are clear "right to repair" and ownership rights that we also need to fight for. Can we focus on those fights instead of shaming software developers for wanting to make money on the code they write?

No, but if something is abandoned by a company, then it should be made open. Your car/dishwasher/washing machine/thermostat/door locks should not stop working because some brilliant small company was bad at the profit side of things and folded. They should not stop working because some large company simply got bored and decided to follow another market trend. This is why user repair-ability/unlocking/jail-breaking of devices should be legally protected.

This even goes for older smart phones. Just because the company needs to turn a profit, doesn't mean I have the means to continually upgrade every 2 years. I love the efforts people put into things like LineageOs.

Consider a Linux phone (Librem 5 or Pinephone) instead, because those do not rely on proprietary drivers, which still can force you to throw your device away at some point.

I'm with you. I've become more sympathetic to Stallman's philosophy in recent years, but it's really only "freedom 1"[1] that I find potentially valuable. The other freedoms (such as 2, which effectively abolishes copyright) would destroy the industry if they were forcibly applied to all software.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#four-freedoms

If you only have freedom 1, you must be a software developer (with a lot of free time) to benefit from that.

The important part of freedom 2 (freely distributing patches to copyrighted software) is already allowed by existing copyright law. You own the copyright to your patches, not the company whose software you're patching.

Extending that freedom to allow distributing the end result of those patches to people who don't have a license to use the original software (as freedom 2 does) would just be another, slightly less direct way of abolishing software copyright.

> would just be another, slightly less direct way of abolishing software copyright

Which is the right thing to do. Copyright creates artificial monopolies and harms users, as was predicted by Stallman: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor.... There should be a different, just way to be paid for software.

> There should be a different, just way to be paid for software.

Fantasy land. Open source projects have been looking for such a way for decades now, with no luck. Copyright has so far proven to be the only practical, "just" way to make software development viable as a business.

Copyright does not in and of itself "harm" users, unless you consider having to pay for the goods you use to be "harm". The harms described in the article you linked could be mitigated by freedom 1 alone (combined with the portion of freedom 3 that's already allowed under existing law, as discussed).

(Max-depth, reply to Vrodni in sister comment)

> if something is abandoned by a company, then it should be made open

Totally agree! Once you start selling a product, you should be required to make provisions for your company not existing anymore. Source-code trusts that have the authority to make code public domain or provide it to stakeholders in certain situations, when it can be shown the current IP-holder is not meeting their obligations, would be a great idea. This does not interfere with the interests of active, good-faith copyright holders, except perhaps by charging them a small fee to the trust.

>User repair-ability/unlocking/jail-breaking of devices should be legally protected.

Totally agree! That is what "right to repair" is referring to.

There are ways to solve these problems, and banning copyright on software isn't really even one of them.

Nobody is shaming devs for making/wanting to make money. We're asserting rights to control the systems that are intimate with our lives as opposed to being hamstrung by fly-by-night operations.

Free software is not against allowing people to make money. In fact, their model is that people are paid to make changes and support the free software and those changes are shared. And it's still possible to make software and get paid without sharing it.

Free software in fact depends on legal protection.

The GPL is a copyright license. It requires copyright law to "function". The FSF does not advocate for the abolition of copyright law.

It is more about what should be open and what shouldn’t be. The core system that drives the device, probably doesn’t need to be open. The app that only make API calls to control the device should be open.

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