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That appalling Richard Stallman | 354 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
That appalling Richard Stallman
Authored by: Ian Al on Wednesday, November 28 2012 @ 04:25 AM EST
Him and his copyleft!

There does not have to be any change in coding practice for your argument to be
the truth.

Our thoughts have been developing along similar lines, although mine are
unconstrained by being informed. I think binaries are already legally
unprotectable. Those who ignore licences that cannot be backed by the law,
correctly applied, can benefit from cracked version copying.

As you say, the walled garden and the internet verified registration code are
about the only real protection for binaries once the false legal theories are
put to rest.

Most code is reusable. It comes from APIs and libraries. The newly written code
is usually quite minimal. Even that tends to be non-creative. Who really does
not draw on the advice and guidance of the experts when writing code? My
suspicion is that the innovation in any newly written code is not in the code,
but is in the abstract ideas behind the code. Hence, clever software written in
spaghetti code. It all shouts of being unprotectable by patent or copyright.

Proprietary code is commercially alive, but legally dead. Any company that wants
others to interwork with their software needs to use copyleft, or attempt a
paid-for walled-garden coding model. Microsoft want other companies to develop
programs for their operating systems. They tried .NET as a very expensive walled
garden approach. They tried to bring in new coders by releasing crippled,
unsupported versions of the .NET development environment. Their direction has
been straight into a brick wall. Windows 8 does not use .NET for apps
development, which is the future they want, rather than more desklaptop.

The only long term basis for new coders is in copyleft and GPL. All Richard
Stallman's nonsense about open code and learning and the only correct model is
inevitable unless the illegal protection of software binaries continues. Even
then, Microsoft have shown that the proprietary model for coding eventually
collapses unless ameliorated by some open source element. Perhaps that is how
Apple will outlive them. However, I don't know the details of Apple's coding
environment model. Do they charge huge amounts for their development
environment? How about apps development?

The apps walled garden could be an admission by proprietary software companies
that the traditional open operating system environment is commercially dying, if
not actually dead. I spent some time trying to get an amateur image maker to
stop trying to install cracked Photoshop programs on his Apple computer. He now
uses Gimp. I can help him, because I use Gimp on Linux.

The outstanding holdout for the proprietary program is the professional user;
Adobe Indesign and Photoshop, music production, such as Cubase, and Autodesk.
Correct application of patent and copyright laws will not change this at all.
However, the introduction of Windows 8 will render the professional use of these
programs almost impossible. Few of them can simply transfer to the Apple OS.

The proprietary program can be ported to Linux. Linux is fully supported by
major computer companies other than Microsoft and Apple. The proprietary model
is not incompatible with running on the GPL Linux operating system. I note that
Oracle stole RedHat Linux on which to run their proprietary database program.

Microsoft and, perhaps, Apple might die, but the old model can continue for many
years. However, if their coding secrets remain trade secrets, they will not be
able to benefit from new coders trained in a copyleft world. If all worthy
programs run on Linux, why would you use any other platform to learn
programming?

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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