Comment by tsally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tsally | Hacker News Reader

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Find me the thing that says that if I make software, I lose rights to it once it gains "importance and acclaim."

There is not anything that says this, that's just the way I believe it should be, for many reasons. Put simply, I don't think anyone has the right or the ability to keep complete control over something as large and important as Harry Potter.

Perhaps I can't ERASE software, but are you saying I can't stop IMPROVING it just because it becomes big?

Never. My claim is that you shouldn't be able to stop others from improving on it. I know definitions of "improve" are going to vary across the board, but the Encylopedia example is something that is an obvious improvement. What if Linus didn't want anyone else to improve on Linux?

There is not anything that says this, that's just the way I believe it should be, for many reasons. Put simply, I don't think anyone has the right or the ability to keep complete control over something as large and important as Harry Potter.

That's fair enough. That's essentially what I'm arguing too, but in reverse. I guess that's just a matter of opinion.

What if Linus didn't want anyone else to improve on Linux?

Then it would have died out in favor of some open source thing. But it was Linus's choice. Say a writer could gain a massive popularity surge by open-sourcing her world and characters. She'd have an edge over Rowling because Rowling won't do that. But either way, it's not the law allowing her to get ahead, it's the market. If Rowling is ignored for some more open world, then the market has spoken. If, however, her ideas stay big despite her retaining outright control, then there's no incentive to take them from her, and my opinion is that it's morally wrong to.

If Linus had kept Linux closed source, people would have still been perfectly within their rights to write a manual about how to write programs for that operating system as long as they didn't sign a NDA. I doubt anyone who read HP signed an NDA...

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