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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Abolish all copyright. Are we hackers or not?

Spoiler alert: They're not!

This is really Venture Capital News, and accordingly they've appropriated the whole "hacker" image in an attempt at authenticity.

pg did originally call it 'startup news' but i don't think you have standing to accuse him of 'appropriating' the term 'hacker' until you've hacked together something of comparable significance to on lisp or viaweb

You understand that completely kills OSS as a concept, right?

Free and open source software licenses are redundant in a world where copyright and intellectual property laws don't exist, and no form of media (including software) can legally be owned by anyone.

Casual reminder that the endgame of the GPL was to make software copyright unenforceable.

Why would that be? Huge amount of OSS is released under fully permissive licenses.

Permissive licenses like "if you use this code you must also make your code available under the same license" form the basis of the world's most often used open source software.

Open licenses are not the same as abolishing copyright.

Those are not permissive licenses. Those are copyleft licenses. As I said, a lot of software uses permissive ones.

https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...

Those licenses only carry weight because of copyright.

I was talking about permissive licenses. They have very few conditions:

https://blog.ipleaders.in/permissive-license-copyleft-possib...

Their weight is irrelevant. They would carry pretty much as much meaning in the complete absence of copyright.

In the world of sensible defaults they wouldn't need to exist at all.

Software licenses exist because copyright enables author to dictate terms. Without that, there are no software licenses. This is where the "without copyright, there is no OSS" comes from.

> Their weight is irrelevant.

I think we're having different conversations. The only thing I'm talking about is whether terms can be legally enforced without copyright.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but it seems to be something like "Permissive licensing is basically like public domain." I don't agree with that line of thinking because of the attribution requirement in permissive licenses, but if that's what you're getting at, I get what you mean.

“Permissive” provided the code is attributed, which the products you advocate for do not do.

So what? Free software was literally created in reaction to copyright protections getting extended to software. They make no sense in a world without copyright.

By the way, it would also kill proprietary software as a concept. Source code leak? It's no longer a crime to use it. We'd never have to read licensing nonsense ever again.

It would kill research. Why pay for R&D when a gazillion other companies will instantly clone it?

And yet the list of the most important inventions there are no inventions created by companies. All tax funded.

Corporations R&D is great at one thing, making things cheaper to produce and thus more widely available. And that's wonderful. But actually we want corporations to steal that tech from each other because then the consumer benefits the most.

What about a simple basic item like Velcro? Or the printing press? Or the copier? Telegraph?

Your claim is… simply utterly untrue.

I exaggerated a bit but none of your examples are from corporate R&D.

Those inventions were mostly self funded by individual inventors who in some cases had a great trouble getting the business interested in the invention at all.

Also how does velcro compare against LED, laser or microchip in terms of importance?

You have my respect.

Who is “we”?

Participants on a site called Hacker News.

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