Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: New Communicational Morality
Keywords: software, copyright, society
Message-ID: <984@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 12 Apr 89 08:14:37 GMT
References: <754@infovax.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> <3687@ficc.uu.net> <1672@orion.cf.uci.edu>
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 41

In article <1672@orion.cf.uci.edu> dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu.UUCP (David Lawyer) writes:
>the right of the author of a program to reasonable compensation for his
>efforts with the "right" of the public to use the software.  I think
>that the recognition of the public's right to use the software is
>important (but this does not necessarily mean the right to use it at no
>cost at all).

"Software" just means computer programs.  Not high-quality programs,
not verified programs, not programs you could expect to sell for real
money, not necessarily finished programs, not programs whose source
code contains no private secrets, just programs.  It is not only
theoretically impossible to draw a rigid distinction between programs
and data, it is impossible in practice as well.  With the programming
language I use, I can not only draw the boundary almost anywhere I care
to in a particular application, I can move it without too much pain.

There is no such animal as "the public", there are only other people.
We cannot have *both* data privacy *and* an unlimited right for anyone
at all to access my programs without my permission.  (Running a program
is not the only way of "using" it.  Sometimes the greatest benefit I
have obtained from someone else's code is from exploiting the ideas in
it to make it do something else.)

There seems to be agreement in the scientific community that publishing
someone else's data without their permission is wrong.  Why is it any
better to make off with a copy of their data if they happen to be
embedded in a program?

Software is not free.  Good software takes a LOT of effort to produce.
David Lawyer is apparently willing to regard years of my life as of
no value because the end product can be copied cheaply.  If someone
has paid me to design a house, or compose an opera, or write a program,
nobody else has any rights to that house, opera, or program at all.

I am fully convinced that co-operation is not only morally better than
competition, it is more efficient.  Over the years I have posted several
minor things to sources news-groups, and I mean to post more.  But it's
one thing to give things away, and it's another to have parasites whining
that they have a right to them.  Why should some stranger have a right to
my love letters just because they happen to exist in the form of a
Postscript program?