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Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

That would be a terrible law. It would dramatically raise prices and reduce choice.

Not really. You’d have to make sure you either own the software you ship or that software is already available freely so you don’t get into the space cadet situation like Microsoft Windows.

> Space Cadet Pinball was not originally written by Microsoft, but was rather obtained via licensing from a company then-known as Cinematronics. This means that there are restrictions on what can be done with the program, as spelled out by the license agreement.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...

The change would be you can’t ship software like this… I would say that is a net positive.

Why should your preferred software licensing policies be legally mandated and binding on others such as myself?

If you don't want others' preferred software licensing policies to be legally mandated and binding on you, are you in favor of abolishing copyright for software?

I think software authors should be able to decide their terms of use, so no.

That is the fundamental difference between free software and open source.

Free software centers around the user. Everything else is a means to that end. Open source centers around the authors. This is fundamentally misguided.

I couldn’t give two [deleted] about authors and what they want.

I'm all for it. Let me pay twice the price for my phone and keep it ten years. It's a better deal for everyone, and firstly for the planet - no need to dig up rare minerals and waste energy and water to churn new phones all the time.

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