Doubt's log

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 Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Bruce Perens: "We believe that there should be a fair, competitive market for computer software, both proprietary and Open Source." [Scripting News]

Problems with the "Sincere Choice:

Open Standards: File formats and protocols that represent significant IP work should be able to get limited protections that allow economic gain to those who did to work to develop them. An example of this is mp3s; I'm quite happy that mp3's were developed and I doubt it would have happened this decade if there hadn't been IP protection from the german(?) institute that developed it.
Choice Through Interoperability: Competing products usually replace each other, and those that you pay for tend to have "migration" features to allow you to switch to them as painlessly as possible. Examples: notes and exchange, money and quicken. It seems that the complaint is mostly related to the free software world. The problem as I see it is that this is the type of feature that isn't trivial or free to implement, or even sexy enough for free software developers to want to do the work. With most products you could choose to use an easier, universally supported format (such as in the document world, plain text, RTF, or even HTML). However most people tend to CHOOSE the formats that aren't easily interoperable because they want the added value of the specific format. 
Research Availability - This is the weakest argument that "Sincere Choice" makes since the GPL *is* compatible with the MIT license, but not vice versa, which means that if it's released GPL, it's stuck. The argument that you are paying twice for the same work (once in the product, the other as a tax payer) isn't correct either, since the economics of having a free version available would drive the cost of such a feature alone to zero. The only reasons to release government research as GPL directly is to make it more difficult to integrate into a commercial product or because they had to in order to advantage of other GPL work. I rather see the public domain grow, then see work thrown in the locked trunk ( to borrow a phrase from Dave Winer) of the GPL.
Range of Copyright Policies & Freedom to Set Policy - Both sides seem to agree about this. Except the software choice side believes that choosing to set an OSS only policy (or commercial only for that matter) doesn't make much sense.


2:09:33 PM    comments ==

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