On 2008-02-09 10:03, Reinhard Mueller wrote:
Am Samstag, den 09.02.2008, 12:53 +1100 schrieb Ben Finney:
In other words, if copyright truly did not exist, and everyone had the same freedoms (and more) in every work, not just those that have such freedoms explicitly granted by the GPL, then there would no longer need to be a GPL.
I don't think so. Without copyright, everybody still had the chance to hide the source and only publish the binaries. Everybody still had the chance to write software that only works on specific hardware, to write software that checks BIOS serial numbers, or whatever.
Without copyright so called piracy would be legal and thus proprietary software looses its commodity character, because it would no longer be scarce. Then, all proprietary software would be out-cooperated by free software, which bases on non-scarcity, e.g. abundance.
But this scenario also develops with copyright, it only takes a longer time to out-cooperate proprietary software.
Ciao, Stefan