First FOSS OS?

Posted Mar 28, 2007 4:05 UTC (Wed) by anonymous1 (guest, #41963)
In reply to: First FOSS OS? by landley
Parent article: The road to freedom in the embedded world

>how about Benjamin Franklin founding the first public library in the country?

Your references are interesting. ACLU, EFF, Ben Franklin. "the country" by which i presume you mean USA.

I guess only 5% of the worlds population matters. The rest? ohh they can be slaves to copyright. Right? I have to reject that NorthAmerican centrisim.

Of all the orgs that you mentioned I have great respect for Micheal Hart of Project Gutenberg. He is an advocate of the Public Domain. and i dont think he likes more than 14 (maybe 28) year copyrights.

> And if you don't believe in copyrights, you should never
> release any code under the GPL but place it in the public domain
> instead (or at least an MIT/BSD license).

and allow other people to make put code back under the slavery of copyright. Nope. GPL defends Freedom, and I am not going to use anything inferior. Of course you understand this well

"[GPL] preamble explaining how it uses copyright law against itself, to effectively keep software in the public domain, and prevent it from being taken OUT of the public domain" -Rob Landley

> Of course the more _obvious_ way you're in conflict with reality
> is that the current legal system very extensively contradicts you

yeah... europe dominated the world for a 500 hundred years and copyright is ubiquitous since the colonial powers signed berne(?) in late 1800s. i see no reason to assume that law defines morality.

> only let you pay me for me to do it for you while you remain
> in ignorance of my secret, forever?

Good strawman. Read "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

most of what we produce is for local consumption, in our local societies. if you reveal a secret in your local community, they why should people who are shores away pay you a royalty. because you are royalty and can impose your will on them? you mean colonial subjects. Now i get it.

I notice that you did not bother to reply to my assertion the OSS people dont care "if under current laws 99% of the worlds non-western people are criminals under copyright law." I presume you read "Misinterpreting Copyright"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html

non-western goverments (in the 60's and 70's)tried and failed to get better copyright treaties

C.F. Johnson,'The Origins of the Stockholm Protocol',
Bulletin of the Copyright Society of the USA, XVIII (1970)
vol 18, pp91, 142-143, 180.

Access to Knowledge is another recent effort to deal with the salvery of copyright and other forms of "IP" .
http://www.cptech.org/a2k/