John Hasler wrote: [...] > In the real world few inventions can be exploited while keeping them > secret.
Uncle Hasler, uncle Hasler. See Shakespeare, Tudor and Jacobean, plus Saxony below. http://www.charvolant.org/~doug/gpl/gpl.pdf --------- 3.1 Intellectual Property Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.[15] The implicit point of view contained in this essay is a Lockean one. Producing a piece of software requires taking the state of nature, the common heritage of software tools and techniques, and using them to fashion something new. To the extent that programming involves labor and thinking is certainly labor, ask any student a piece of software is [intellectual] property. To the extent that invention requires labor, an invention is property. This state of affairs is recognized in intellectual property law, such as copyright and patent law. Nothing, of course, prevents the creator from choosing to place the fruits of their labor in the public domain, for whatever reason they choose. Or to place it under the GPL. But the choice to do so is theirs. 3.2 The Economic Arguments of the FSF It is worth examining the economic arguments put forward by the FSF. These arguments are largely intended to refute any benefit that non-free software production might have on society at large. Unsurprisingly, I find these arguments rather unconvincing. In one article, economic arguments are crudely mischaracterized as a form of holding-to-ransom.[28] This article claims that the economic argument is constructed in terms of proprietary software versus no software at all. However, the economic argument is largely concerned with notions of allocation of resources. Its more efficient, in terms of producing software that users want to use, to have a feedback loop connected to users (more on this in section 3.3.2). Specialization and division of labor suggests that allowing professionalization will lead to a greater output of higher quality software; the FSF allows professionalization, but only in a restricted environment. Ricardos law suggests that allowing professionals to specialize and trade will provide a greater total output of all economic goods, not just software.[24] Another article cites the ready copyability of software as providing a different economic model to book publishing.[29] This argument entirely ignores the underlying costs of producing a book and considers only the costs of producing a hard copy; it also ignores the existence of the photocopier. The major investment in any creative work, be it a program, book or piece of music, lies the in the process of creation. A book needs to be written, edited, re-written, typeset, published. A program needs to be written, debugged, packaged. All of these things involve work; this is where the notion of ownership comes from, not the duplication of the final piece. Finally, there is the question of wasted effort. An example is given of closed software requiring wasted make-work to provide a suitably adapted version.[28] This is a reasonable criticism of closed software, although not of all proprietary software (see section 3.4). However, if make-work is regarded as a waste, then the GPL forces make-work for anybody unwilling to accept the terms of the GPL; this aim is implicit in the argument for GPLing libraries.[30] If closed software imposes a social and economic cost, then so does the GPL. 3.3 Amateurs, Professionals and Patronage The main benefit to society and the economy of such intellectual property notions as copyright and patents is the creation or encouragement of a class of professionals. Allowing somebody talented in a certain field to make a living directly from that field has a number of advantages: the most obvious is the ability of talent to concentrate on what they are good at, rather than requiring them to undertake other tasks to support themselves; additionally, specialization is permitted, leading to a feedback loop where skills are honed and improved. Prior to copyright, those wishing to be inventors, authors or other creative artists had to either find a patron or have additional means. 3.3.1 Patronage In the past, anybody not of independent means who wanted to create something intended for general release needed to find a patron: a person willing to foot the bills in exchange for some intangible return. Many creator-patron relationships were very fruitful, with the patron acting as a source of inspiration to the creator. However, unless they were beings of considerable foresight, patrons intended to use their association with artists and scientists to further their own political ends. Patronage is, today, a little more sophisticated. The general model is endowments to a university or other institution which, in turn, makes research and thought available to the public domain. The patrons derive advertising and public relations benefits from their sponsorship. Most governments recognize the benefits to be had from a stream of new ideas and research moving into the public domain and provide some patronage through funding arrangements. This form of institute-based patronage seems to be the ideal for the FSF; a community of public-spirited developers all working towards the common good. The first problem with this model is the restricted financing available. Endowments from commerce essentially come out of a public relations budget; necessarily limited. Support from the public purse runs into the political problem of taxation levels and control. In theory, all software could be publicly funded by using the sums spent on commercial software. The rise in taxation, even if it were to take less than the cost of commercial software would be politically unpopular. The lack of control over what software is delivered is also likely to be a point of resistance. The second problem with this model is that of feedback. Microsoft at least tries to find out what their customers wanteven if it results in obvious idiocies, such as talking paper-clips.[26] The institute-based model has no feedback mechanism or, even worse, a feedback mechanism based on internal squabbles or the political aims of the patrons. The result is that the software produced tends to reflect the interests of the programmers, rather than the users. This is obvious in most open-source: system programs, utilities and development tools abound; applicationswith the exception of every hackers favorite, gamesare harder to find. The GNU offerings are almost exclusively system and development tools. The open-source movement has provided the impetus for another form of patronage. Companies such as RedHat or Linuxcare need free software to succeed to be successful themselves. As a result, these companies hire the producers of free software to ensure the supply, provide good public relations and provide in-house expertise for the support operations that make up the companies income. This is in addition to the general desire on the companys part to do the right thing; open-source is still a social movement. Eric Raymond argues that this form of patronage works, in part, because the companies dispensing the patronage are leaders in the field, and thus benefit in proportion.[20] If this is true, then it also represents the break-point for this form of patronage. As the market becomes more competitive, a significant free-rider problem appears: companies that do not have the overhead of patronage and can offer the same services at reduced cost.[13] 3.3.2 Amateurs The alternative to professionalism or patronage is amateurism: doing something for the sake of interest in doing it. The word amateur has acquired a negative connotation over the years, having overtones of halfbaked or poorly done. This extra baggage is unfortunate; many amateurs are of the highest levels of skill and dedication,5 and I dont intend to suggest otherwise. A notable feature of amateurs is that they can approach problems with an eclectic viewpoint which may be absent from a purely professional approach. However, an amateur production of anything, whether it be a software package or theater production requires either independent means or another source of income and a dedication to using ones spare time in the pursuit of the production to the exclusion of other activities.6 Open-source software is the beneficiary of a peculiar state in the software industry: many of those who are amateur programmers by night are professional programmers by day. Linuxand the Unix approach, in general has made amateur programming attractive. Rather than produce a large, complex program requiring a huge team to produce and maintain, small packages can be produced. Software can easily be divided into front- and back-end parts, so that functionality can be produced and tested, without the overhead of a GUI. The upshot is that open-source, at present, gains the benefits of both amateur enthusiasm and inventiveness and professional knowledge and discipline (and income). This blessed state of affairs exists while there is a pool of professional programmers able and willing to use their spare time to produce open-source software. I would suggest that the aims of the FSF will reduce this pool enormously, and the effects will be catastrophic. Eric Raymond has argued that open-source culture is essentially a gift culture; resources are in abundance and you gain status by the bestowing of gifts on the community.[22] The absence of a large supply of well-paying professional jobs in softwaremore or less predicated on a large scale commercial industry will re-introduce the economics of scarcity to the software culture. 3.4 Patents Are Your Friends Open-source software has an enviable reputation for reliability. The usual reasons given for this reliability are that the presence of the source code allows immediate analysis and rectification of any problem and that the ability to contribute enhancements and bug-fixes vastly expands the number of people working on and contributing to a piece of code.[21] Generally, the notions of open-source and non-proprietary software are conflated as opposed to closed, proprietary software. However, there is no particular reason to do so. Instead, software can be categorized using two axes: an open-closed axis and a free-proprietary one.[2] The benefits accruing to open-source software are largely connected to the open-closed axis. It is the making source code available that allows the peer-review and correction feedback loop to take off. Making software proprietary does stem the flow of contributions, of course; nobody particularly wants to contribute to someone elses profit at their own cost. To offset this effect, open, proprietary software can easily provide a renumeration model, offering payment or royalties for contributions. [...] To see the benefits of patents (and copyright) in maintaining information, a historical example might help. In the era of Shakespeare, a would-be publisher only had to get hold of a manuscript, by fair means or foul, to be able to copy and print it. (The first publication of Shakespeares sonnets followed this pattern.) Similarly, any acting troupe that could gain access to a play could perform it. As a consequence, play manuscripts were deliberately obscured and divided up, with an actor being given just his lines, along with suitable cues. The natural result of this is that many Tudor and Jacobean plays exist only in fragmentary form; we only have the works of Shakespeare today because he was well-regarded enough for a syndicate to track down most of his work and publish it in the first folio.[23, 3] As another historical example, the technique of porcelain manufacturing was almost lost to Europe. Saxonys attempts to maintain a monopoly on porcelain production led to obsessive secrecy and the intriguing that secrecy brings. Information was kept in the players heads and withheld for political advantage.[12] True, patents carry an additional piece of economic baggage over and above open-source: they encourage8 inventors to work on, and profit from, their inventions. From an economic perspective, this is a quid pro quo for having come forward in the first place, rather than keeping the invention a secret. Secrecy may not seem very relevant to software. In the general scheme of things, true secrecy is difficult to achieve, as something, a program or a file format has be be available and is vulnerable to reverse engineering. This represents an annoyance, but not a block to the dissemination of information. To prevent dissemination, if the discoverer of a new algorithm so wishes, he or she can, to coin a word, bureauise the algorithm: provide it only through the services of a company to which you submit information for processing. Bureauisation can occur whenever the process is complex, but the results simple. Combinatorial problems take this form, for example optimal path computation, or the prime factoring of large numbers.9 Bureauisation represents an obvious social and economic burden, yet it is a natural consequence of no intellectual property protection. Ultimately, patents provide the kind of legal protection needed to allow VAS vendors to open their source. Without some sort of protection, secrecy and obscurantism, with their costs, rule. It is possible to argue that the costs of intellectual property outweigh the costs of no such protection. But I think the verdict of history is against that argument. --------- regards, alexander. _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
