🚀 go-pugleaf

> Have you read <URL:http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html>? I think
> the government can be a wonderful *facilitator* here, not an
> allocator. Keep in mind that at least in democratic states what the
> government does is supposed to represent what the citizens want.
>

I think the proposed system is terrible, DATs should not be taxed at
all. Of course, I am a libertarian and believe that what the
government does is supposed to protect the rights to life, liberty and
property exclusively, even if the citizens might want otherwise.

> RMS presents a model for music that could easily work with software
> too. All the government has to do is collect taxes and then hand the
> money back to the developers, according to how the taxpayers
> vote. This would be a great way to reward people for their efforts
> without restricting distribution of software/music/books/whatever, if
> we could start over tomorrow. Unfortunately copyright has a lot of
> inertia.


I don't think this ste in the mentioned URL:

: Use a survey system to measure the extent of copying of each musical piece. 

Could possibly work for software. Here are a few reasons:

* Look at any of the attempts to count Linux users by direct survey -
do you think these are remotely accurate? Users are too lazy to
respond to a survey unless it is mandatory, in which case it is evil.

* The survey would have to be very broad to catch all the rarely used
packages in a representative way.

* How widely a program is distributed is not the sole measure of its
usefulness. For example, whoever wrote the Linux `mount' would be on
the gravy train with this system, since everyone has it; but it is a
comparatively trivial program and requires little maintenance. As
another example, most Linux distributions ship both `mawk' and `gawk',
but few people would ever use both of these, even if they'd want Awk
at all. On the other hand there are some free programs that are very
complex but serve fairly niche needs (that are nontheless very great
needs), such as Samba.

* A lot more users would probably use end-user applications than
tools, but without tools development the end-user apps would
languish.

And so on. Most of the problems stem from the fact that different
pieces of software are much less uniform in degree of
interchangability and design complexity than a piece of music.

Also, it may be hard sorting out the relative contributions of the
100s of contributors to the typical GPL work. I don't think lines of
code is a good measure - some lines count for a lot more than others.

 - Maciej


-- 
guile -c '(define c call-with-current-continuation)(define(f s)(lambda(o)(let
((n(c(lambda(x)(o x)x))))(let p((n n)(l(string->list s)))(cond((not (null? l)
)(display(car l))(p(c n)(cdr l))))))))((f"Js nte ul akr")(f"utAohrGieHce\n"))'