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Re: Copyright Misuse Doctrine in Apple v. Psystar


From: Hyman Rosen
Subject: Re: Copyright Misuse Doctrine in Apple v. Psystar
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:12:37 -0500
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209)

amicus_curious wrote:
It would seem to me that anyone wanting to be of service to the world, as the FOSS advocates claim that they want to be, would not be so resentful of the rest. If you resent someone else making money, what is the solution? That no one make any money? That is not good in the long term in a society where the money keeps the economy strong.

The FSF does not want to be of service to the world nor do they
resent making money. They believe that software users should be
able to run, read, modify, and share that software, and have
designed a copyright license so that they and like-minded authors
can achieve that principle for software under their control.

The only resentment that I can see appears to come from people
who want to redistribute such software while denying users the
rights that the authors sought to protect. Those people deserve
and get no consideration.

Everyone is entitled to try and make money. No one is entitled
to demand that someone else help them make money.

What is under the hood is not important

The FSF believes that users of software should have the freedom
to run, read, modify, and share that software. They believe that
users should have full access to what is under the hood. They do
not like people who want to prevent such access, and they aim to
prevent those people from using the software in that way.

My view is that the history of FOSS is pretty much duplicating
> something that is proprietary.

The added improvement is freedom. You do not own other people's
time. If they wish to devote themselves to duplicating existing
software, that us their prerogative. It is not important that
free software be original. It is important that it be free, and
that it encourages freedom by raising the expense for those who
would deny freedom to their users, by forcing them to pay or to
duplicate what they might otherwise have gratis.

Stallman seems to see profits from innovation as something to eradicate.

Stallman sees non-free software as something to eradicate.

There are a thousand contributors to Linux, but there are tens
> of millions of users. That seems unbalanced to me.

Those millions of users all share in the freedom offered by the
GPL. What is the meaning of "balance" here? There is no necessary
relationship between numbers of developers and numbers of users.


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