References

Posted Oct 22, 2004 15:56 UTC (Fri) by hppnq (subscriber, #14462) [Link]

Okay, so he's not stupid. Must be a secret agenda then.

Posted Oct 22, 2004 21:59 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

I notice from his web page that he doesn't have listed anything about copyright, intellectual property, or licensing. Smart people will often say stupid things about topics which are just outside of their area of knowledge, and this seems to be a prime example. He clearly wants to apply economics to an area which is driven not be the creation of wealth but the creation of custom goods. He wants to apply contract law to copyright licensing.

Linus got the opportunity to "cash out" of Linux in the mid-90s, when he had a working *nix kernel on his x86. Many developers do join projects, do the thing they want done, and quit once the project satisfies their needs, having gotten the thing they wanted for a reasonable investment of effort. Sure, they can't exchange it for its value (to them) in cash, but the same is true of tailored suits.

You can't include remedies in a license; someone infringing a copyright has no license at all, so the details of some license the person does not have don't matter. Furthermore, there may be many licenses the owner offers to different or the same people, and any of these is sufficient, regardless of the terms of others of them. Or the owner may not license the work at all, keeping it private. In cases of infringement, it is the nature of the work and the infringement which matter; licenses don't matter to the penalties for infringement except in so far as they imply things about the work.