🚀 go-pugleaf

phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut) writes:

> If electronic payment entered the HTTP protocol, the Internet would become
> much more friendly toward free software.

Even if this didn't completely go against the principle of being free
to use something, money or not, I should inform you that I am sitting
behind a rather large proxy server and I don't "count" if someone else
on my network has accessed your page.

It would be really easy for a bunch of free beer people to only
download pages once, and then pass them around internally. Then you
would get, basically, "pirated free software." is this really what we
want?

If your program is really useful, I shouldn't have to be forced into
paying for it. I can decide that it's worth getting my patronage. I am
only advocating that think about changing the social contracy
regarding copyright. The advent of digital technology make many better
alternatives possible. I'd hate to see something like the story in
RMS's "The Right to Read" happen just because people throw their hands
up and say "socialism" at the issue of government-facilited
patronage.

"The first truth is that liberty is not safe if the people tolerate the
growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger
than that of their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is
Fascism."  - Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I think software publishing companies, book printers, and record
labels are getting to this point. We certainly don't need to amend
HTTP so web hosting companies can be there too. We have to give
consideration to how the democratic state can tackle the problem of
letting people make better software/writing/music, and making it with
less hassle or loss of money from "the system".

Our current compromise, copyright, was made in a time when peer review
and collaborative creativity was a lot less important. As ESR pointed
out, it's completely the opposite with software, so that developers
have to choose between the approach that makes a better program
(open-source) and the approach that makes them rich (proprietary).
I beleive that ever since hip-hop music has been getting to this state
too. With music, sampling laws have been getting in the way of
creativity more than helping it. We have to ask ourselves, "why are we
doing this?" Is there any good reason other than it's just been done
that way since Gutenberg? I cannot accept that an idea dating from a
time when freedom of information was just plain physically impossible
has any relevance today. It has just led to companies like Microsoft
being the sort of powers FDR warned about.

-- 
please read: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
"cry me a bayou/and i'm leaving..." -tricky