🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6up86o$t23$1@nntp.ucs.ubc.ca>, Bill Unruh
<unruh@physics.ubc.ca> writes
>So you feel that there should only be STarbucks selling coffee in any
>city? Or only one laundry company? After all they had an idea and they
>should therefor have the absolute right to realise that idea? 

Are you really trying to claim that coffee or laundry services are
recently discovered/invented things? They are generic services whereas a
software (or other) product is not.

A product such as software is the result of lots of hard work by a
limited number of people (often just one person). There is nothing to
stop others from doing similar work and creating a similar product but
the product that 'Bob' came up with is his and he is perfectly entitled
to dispose of it in any way that he pleases. If 'Bob' (an imaginary
person exising only for the purposes of this arguement) chooses to
release the product for free under GPL or a similar license great. If
'Bob' chooses to sell his product so that he can earn monetary reward
for his efforts why do you complain.

Do you work for free? If so how do you pay for things like a home, food,
clothing?

>Why should society not grant everyone monopoly rights? After all that
>was how the USSR worked and we know the great success they had in

Why must people continually resort to such a weak arguement. If anything
the Soviet communists would have been far more likely to insist that
licenses which rewarded an individual or company for their efforts are
wrong - they seemed to beleive that the rewards should go to society and
that the government was best placed to manage that.

>The usual argument is that if such monopolies were not granted then
>people would cease to produce things like software.

No such monopoly does exist. Anyone is free to create a competing
product which fact Linux proves.

>excuse, why does free software exist? (Linux et al). And why in the
>world is a 70 year monopoly granted in the case of software (the
>copyright time limit). Surely a much better model would be to grant say
>a 3 year monopoly, with say a further 3 years if the source code were
>published. That way at least society would get something out of the
>deal. 

And what gives 'society' the right to restrict my ownership of a product
that *I* and *I alone* have developed? 70 years may be relevant where
you are bu I am in the UK and I hold copyright on my works for the whole
of my life and then my estate gets a further 50 years. My company,
however, can own the copyright for as long as it exists which is
entirely right.

>companies had the right to a monopoly? (Remember the USA went through
>this whole exercise in the 19th century when the railroads managed to
>persuade the governments that granting them monopolies was in the best
>interests of the nation. It was finally realised that it was actually
> in the best interests of the monopoly holders and not of the society at
>large.)

Without those monopoly rights who would have built your railroads?

-- 
Jason Clifford
Definite Linux Systems
http://definite.ukpost.com/