Stefan's headers [was:Names and identifiers]

[Richard Damon]

On 6/9/18 1:07 AM, Gregory Ewing wrote:
> Chris Angelico wrote:
>> Open source would not exist without copyright,because it is
>> copyright law that gives license terms their meaning.
>
> That statement doesn't make any sense. If there were no
> copyright laws, there would be no need for licences to
> distribute software.
>
> You seem to be saying that nobody would ever release the
> source of their software unless they could impose some
> kind of restrictions on what people could do with it.
>
> But I don't think that's true at all. Open sharing of
> software was the *default* before people got the idea
> of applying copyright laws to it. If there were no
> copyright laws, people who wanted to share their source
> would still do so, and people who wanted to keep it a
> trade secret would still do so. The only difference is
> there would be less lawyers making money out of it. 
Copyright law is not what makes something 'closed source' in the eyes of
the Open Source community. For example, Microsoft doesn't use Copyright
to keep the source code for Windows secret, they just don't provide it.
The thing that gives the Open Source licenses the power to force people
to share the source code is that their IS a copyright on the source code
and the usage license on it demands revealing modifications to others.

If software providers could no longer depend on Copyright law, then you
would see much more use of the hobbling copy protection technologies,
and automatically enforced licensing methods. That, and a lot less
software produced.

-- 
Richard Damon