🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <603@pyrmania.oz>, major@pta.oz.au (Major) writes:
|> tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
|> >david@WUBIOS.WUSTL.EDU (David J. Camp) writes: 
|> >|> The FSF would like to eliminate the copyright law, 
|> >As I understand it, this is false,
|> It is true, read the GNU manifesto.

It actually does not state so explicitly.

|> >In fact, in the absence of copyrights, FSF itself could not prevent
|> >commercial exploitation of GNU software.
|> 
|> In the ascence of copyrights the GNU software could be taken back from
|> the commercial arena at any time. 

Not true: if sources are not distributed, you cannot "take them back
from the commercial arena".

In the low-end software market, for practical purposes, there is no
copyright law. As a result, software vendors invent all sorts of
hardware protection schemes and encryption methods. Abolishing
copyrights on sources and binaries (as opposed to abolishing patents on
algorithms, which is a completely different issue) would mean that
virtually all commercial software would be hardware keyed, with the
corresponding expenses and hassles, and that low cost commercial
software would disappear entirely.