[clug] Re: A most interesting read, most interesting

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 02:04:39AM +1100, Peter Anderson wrote:
> And unlike some 
> correspondents to this discussion I am firmly on the side of the 
> developer owning the rights to ideas he/she develops. It might seem a 
> good utopian concept to believe that ideas are not the property of their 
> developers; instead they are the property of society as a whole. The 
> logic of how this happens escapes me and its adoption is not something 
> that is going to happen in a very long time - most of the world, I 
> believe, does not support such a concept. 

It should be remember that the concept of exclusive ownership of ideas
is a very recent concept, that did not exist until a few hundred years
ago.

And I think you should be careful with phrases like "property of
society". What does that mean anyway? I think you'll find very few
peolpe who beleive that the decendants of a singer should be able to
claim royalties in perpituity. At some point a line has to be drawn and
said: after this point you still get attribution, but you (or your
descendants) no longer have rights to say who can do what with your
work.

At such a point what do you call it? The common phrase is "public
domain". It doesn't matter what, but it has to exist.

> Given all of the above, I too have the greatest of respect for those 
> developers of ideas who then forego their ownership rights and assign 
> them over to the community at large. Personally, I support these people 
> by making the move to open source systems (he says typing this e-mail in 
> Thunderbird on his Ubuntu box).

I have certainly never assigned ownership rights to anybody. And please
don't say that people who develop open source have done so. They have
simply published under a fairly liberal licence, but it's certainly not
public domain. At the very least they retain the right of attribution.

> If you accept the argument that there is no ownership over 
> ideas then by making the idea available to the public via say open 
> source licensing these developers are giving us nothing because they 
> never owned it in the first place.

There is a large flaw in your argument, which assumes that ideas only
have value if they are owned. This obviously false. Let's try your
sentence with roads.

: If you accept the argument that there is no ownership over 
: [roads] then by making the [roads] available to the public via say open 
: source licensing these [councils] are giving us nothing because they 
: never owned it in the first place.

Roads, like ideas, have an intrinsic value, whether or not somebody
owns them. By publishing an idea you have made the whole world richer
because everybody can benefit from it. Open source licencing is a legal
construct to acheive a goal, nothing more.

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog at svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.
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