20 Feb
2006
20 Feb
'06
6:49 p.m.
On Mon, 2006-02-20 at 17:41 -0500, Rob wrote:
If I am a "copyright zealot" then so are the legal systems of the vast
majority of countries in the world.
Lee
On Mon February 20 2006 17:13, Lee Revell wrote:
I hope you understand that there could be no "free software" without
copyright. If you like the GPL you have copyright law to thank.
The point is, the developer of a piece of
software has the
right to release it under any license they choose. It's not
OK to violate the license (whether open source or proprietary)
just because you disagree with it.
They have the legal right, thanks to a century of lobbying by
people who had too much money to begin with, but the idea that
they have the moral right is purely your opinion. Despite
making my living writing and oftentimes selling software, I
don't share that opinion.
If you
don't like it write your own app.
I think that rather than writing my own music app from scratch,
I'll just keep encouraging people to embrace free software.
So far this approach has gotten me and everyone else an operating
system and a few thousand applications to play with, despite 20
years of hearing that exact same line from copyright zealots....