Copyright and free software
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What mean free software when you see this in the bottom of this web site?
and this...
Copyright is misunderstood. In fact it is copyright that makes free software possible. The free licences like GPL are based on copyright. Copyright protects the author's rights, the right to release his work under the terms he wishes, and to enforce his rights when someone violates the terms of distribution.
Without copyright, the GPL and similar licenses will have no meaning, and the software would be either public domain or proprietary.
Yeah... Copyright make it possible.
Il giorno 03/feb/2012 07:31, <name at domain> ha scritto:
> Copyright is misunderstood. In fact it is copyright that makes free
> software possible. The free licences like GPL are based on copyright.
> Copyright protects the author's rights, the right to release his work under
> the terms he wishes, and to enforce his rights when someone violates the
> terms of distribution.
> Without copyright, the GPL and similar licenses will have no meaning, and
> the software would be either public domain or proprietary.
>
I am a translator!
Free software doesn't mean freeware software. A license is always necessary, the difference is how much freedom does the license give to the user ;)
I know that... Tank you :-D
Il giorno 03/feb/2012 09:39, <name at domain> ha scritto:
> Free software doesn't mean freeware software. A license is always
> necessary, the difference is how much freedom does the license give to the
> user ;)
>
You can notice that Web sites such as https://www.fsf.org and https://www.gnu.org have the same kind of copyright notice. Notice also that the chosen license (CC-BY-ND) is not free in the sense that the visitor is not allowed to modify the content.
The point is: text and software have different objectives. A software is to achieve the user's work. The user therefore deserves the four freedoms. A text is either an art piece (the reader wants to "feel" things) or states opinions (the case of the FSF sites). In the former case, the ability to modify does not look essential to the reader but is nice for the development of the culture (therefore the copyright should not last *tens* of years after the *deaths* of the authors). In the latter case, it should never become modifiable.
Ok so in that way i support copyright. But i've always associated Copyleft with freesoftware. I thought it was, in the red corner: Stallman, copyleft and Stop SOPA. And in the blue corner: Music Producer, Copyright and SOPA...
I think i realy need to read on this subject.
Thank you guys!
marioger, may I suggest the excellent
Copyright is about rights of authors and the users of his/her work. It hasn't anything bad in a begining. The polemic comes when too much rights are reserved to the authors in the way that don't let users to use works in freedom.
Maybe the opposite of Copyright, in that sense, is the public domain, the category where falls any work when the associated Copyright expired (~70 years after the publication or the death of the author). When a work is in public domain, you can do everything with that work, although I read that any kind of authory acknowledgment is reserved for avoiding plagiarism. A lot of people demands reduction of the number of years before copyright expires. CC-0 license is a good license if you want to do the best for leaving the maximum number or reserved rights.
Copyleft is the use of copyright's rights which have got the author for legally establish that his/her work can be reused for building a new work, BUT under the condition that the new work must be able to be reused again by other people.
In my opinion, if doen't matter what other people can do with your work (or the use of it is the more important thing of that work), release it under public domain. If you want to assure that works derived from your work will be able to be used for other people in the future, choose a copyleft license. If you don't want that your work is going to be reused without asking you first, look up a good CC license which respect freedom of those people who only want to enjoy the work as you did it.
However, talking of software, although copyright expires, you will never know what software did and does, since there is no law that says that the source code must be showed when copyright expires. It is big deal since lets software writers to release malevolent programs.
At any case, thinking on reusing the code, it is not important that source code is not available after finish copyright because software changes very very fast: ¡only 5 years is a lot! That code would be only interesting for didactic or recreational purposes after expiration of copyright.
What free software reclaims is that source code and the possibility of modify it is available from the first moment that anyone can run it!
I disagree. Let us dream and imagine that the law would mandate the publication of the source code of any program when its release is 10 years old. LibreOffice would perfectly read .doc files! That is only an example. Even if you consider that no file format/program you use today were released 10 years ago, such a law would be very useful to develop new free softwares because the technology evolves incrementally. For instance, it certainly is helpful to read the video card drivers' source code that were released 10 years ago to understand how to write a driver for the last models of this company; it is useful to read the source code of Flash 1 to develop a modern Flash player; etc.
Anyway, let us come back to reality: most of the countries in the occidental world are lobbied by the cultural industry to extend the copyright up to 100 years after the death of the authors. These lobbies have always succeeded and it looks like no production of the last 70 years will ever become "public domain"... :-(
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