







Updated 1/21/2011



Comments     Threshold


RE: Lame
By Motoman on 1/21/2011 5:09:06 PM , Rating: 4
No, you both appear to be people who think the labors of other people should be make public domain and that said laborers deserve no compensation for their work.

RE: Lame
By rs2 on 1/24/2011 6:33:46 AM , Rating: 2
You're halfway there. The labors of other people should be made public domain (particularly in cases where they open up the inner workings of their labors by doing things like open-sourcing them), that part is a given. Too much value is lost if people are allowed to squat on their good ideas for the 80 years or whatever needlessly long span of time it is that copyright allows for.

But said laborers absolutely do deserve compensation for their work, and said compensation should come from the public, in an amount that is directly proportional to the popularity of the work. If you come up with something that millions of people copy and use, then you deserve to get rich off of it. But you don't deserve the authority to say how those people are allowed to use that thing you made that they all copied. Particularly in cases where the author deliberately exposes the internals of their work to the entire world, as with open-source software.

You wan't to keep control of your work? Then don't make its inner workings a matter of public knowledge. Want to have the inner workings be a matter of public knowledge anyways? Then accept that by doing so you forfeit your right to exert control over how people make use of your work. A little common sense could go a long way here.

RE: Lame
By wallijonn on 1/24/2011 10:18:10 AM , Rating: 2

The "You" in this case is a corporation, not an individual. At the very least it is a team of programmers, none of which have the right of ownership of the finished product. As such what is being quibbled about are licensing fees. Google may not have liked the rate, and now it may have to pay even more than if they had paid the royalties.

RE: Lame
By HrilL on 1/24/2011 11:42:41 AM , Rating: 1
Sun was supposed to and promised to open source this code before Oracle bought them. Oracle changed what Sun was going to do. Also Oracle claimed they wouldn't attack the open source community before they got EU Commission and DOJ/FTC approval. They didn't keep their word. I say screw them and their lies.

