Re: GNU/Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

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Richard M. Stallman wrote:

	The current
models have created a conduit for socialist disintegration of the american hi tech markets, loss of jobs, and have funnelled technology out of the country. Legal defense funds should be the biggest red flags of all. If this system you devised really works, why all the litigation? Why all the need for legal defense funds and patent
   infringement insurance?

I think you are combining several different issues that need to be
addressed separately.  The GNU GPL works well for the problems it was
designed to solve, especially the problem of having to compete with
proprietary modified versions of your own free software.  It succeeds,
to the extent copyright holders enforce it, in ensuring that all users
of the program get the source code and are free to run, change, and
redistribute the program.  But it does not solve all the world's
problems, or even all of software's ethical problems.  That is too
much to expect.

No software license can make software patents go away, nor can any
software license by itself change the larger patterns--the
globalization of business power, the erosion of democracy, the
increasing concentration of wealth.  Those problems are real, and I
don't know how to solve them, so I hope someone else finds a way.
Meanwhile, the GNU GPL does what we can reasonably ask of it.

This movement has spawned a global attitude that has no respect
   for IP rights,

That attitude does not come from me.  I think it comes from the use of
the biased and misleading term "IP rights".  That term lumps together
more than a dozen disparate laws, which have little in
common--including, for instance, copyright law and patent law, whose
practical effects in the software field are completely different.

Discussing these various laws as "IP" tends to lead people to
simplistic, across-the-board views.  It also leads people to imagine
that there is some sort of general "principle of IP" that these
various laws were designed to embody (which is historically false).
That's how you get so many people who are "for IP" or "against IP".

To avoid these confusions, I decided not to use the term "IP" (except
when it means "Internet Protocol").  It is clearer to discuss
copyright, patents, and trademarks as three separate issues; that way,
we can think about each of them in terms of how it affects society,
without being drawn towards simplistic, across-the-board views.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml for more explanation
of this issue.


Richard,

It is within your power to revise the GP L to address these issues. You should consider doing so. I would be happy to propose several changes in future revisions. Let me know where, when, and what to provide. You can be assured I'll provide some very excellent input on these issues.
Jeff

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