Re: [Fsfe-uk] Young Greens moving on FS

[Dale Mellor]

Ian Lynch writes:
 > On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 09:20, root wrote:
 > > Mark Preston writes:
 > >  
 > >  > You are almost certainly correct when you state that "many Free 
 > > Software 
 > >  > folks are quite happy with Copyright". The Gnu GPL would not be 
 > >  > necessary if there was no copyright laws that could be infringed. The 
 > >  > Gnu project could happily continue IMHO if copyright laws were 
 > > abolished.
 > > 
 > > 
 > > WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG 
 > > 
 > > Without copyright laws M****S*ft could and would take firefox, bundle
 > > it with their OS under their own brand name, [details relevant to the 
 > > context were snipped here...]
 > 
 > But with no copyright at all you could then take whatever they did and
 > rebrand it to whatever you wanted. While there is copyright law you need
 > ways of licensing that maximise freedom without allowing completely
 > unfair exploitation. Ok you might not get the source code (but how
 > likely is the source to stay secret if anyone could leak it leagally?)


    It is not being able to get the source code that is precisely the
    problem. MS could still force their employees into a legally
    binding contract that forbids them from giving away MS source
    code, beit derived from free software or not.