[CrackMonkey] All Hail The Glorious People's License

[Seth David Schoen]

Joakim Ziegler writes:

> On Sun, Aug 27, 2000 at 01:21:18PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> > begin  Paul J Collins quotation:
>  
> >> The GPL could not work in its present form if the copyright system did
> >> not enable works to be owned.
> 
> > And, at that precise point, its mechanisms would no longer be needed.
> > Neat, eh?
> 
> Actually, they would, sadly. In a copyright-free society, there would be no
> guarantee that you would be able to get source, merely that you would be able
> to legally copy whatever data you were given access to.

Mmmm, this isn't the worst thing in the world.  Without copyright,
it's hard to get people to accept a license which forbids
decompilation, disassembly, and reverse-engineering.

Decompilers for some languages and compilers are quite good, and often
produce comprehensible output.  (The _best_ thing to decompile is a
bytecode like Java; the worst is probably a well-optimized low-level
language like C.)  They aren't widely available, though, maybe for
legal or economic reasons.

It's still not the "preferred form of the work for making
modifications", but I think that's OK.  The _real_ harm of binary-only
distributions is when they are used to conceal secrets (formats,
protocols, algorithms) and people who discover those secrets can be
sued.

In a copyright world, where reverse engineering can be forbidden in
some jurisdictions, binary-only software is potentially a threat to
security, interoperability, and education.  In a non-copyright world,
those would typically not be the case; distributing just binaries
might merely be thought of as rude.  It would only take one person
with a debugger to learn the interesting bits and start a
source-code-available fork; the original publisher would not have any
obvious recourse to prevent this.

The argument for forcing people to publish source is much weaker in
the absence of copyright.

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5