Le 19 mars 2016 04:29:45 GMT+01:00, "Andrew A. Adams" <aaa@meiji.ac.jp> a écrit :
Fabio Pesari wrote:
His silence left me some time to think about this issue. I came to the
conclusion that there isn't the mindset yet for this kind of reasoning,
and such proposals can be considered even offensive by some developers.
I think some developers would feel more comfortable selling their code
to VCs and big companies than the users themselves, even if they got to
keep the copyright and to keep selling the programs.
I had a similar experience recently in trying to persuade some academic
literature Open Access discussants that CC-BY-SA (the copyleft CC license
that corresponds most closely to the GPL) should be the correct license
for
published academic papers. I pointed out that "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly
prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." but I
then went on to pioint out that the CC-BY element means that anything which
is just a straight copy won't be bought by anyone because it is (or at least
should be) available gratis elsewhere (and easily finadable). I then pointed
out that the SA copyleft element meant that anyone making some kind of
derivative work would have to offer that work under a libre license and that
if it was really exxpensive no one would buy it (then who cares that it
exists, no one is paying for it) and if it's cheap enough, some group could
club together, buy access to a single copy anad then re-distribute.
The only respondent just quoted the first line "CC-BY-SA doesn't directly
prevent someone from taking that work and putting it behind a paywall." and
said that this
clearly means that CC-BY-SA is not the right license,
competely ignoring my analysis of the implications of the SA element. Sigh.
I must also admit, that since I don't generally get paid for my academic
writing (*) that I don't really care if someone makes a derivative work and
makes some modest money from it. So long as they don't do so by trying to
restrict access to my work by me and others, I don't care if they manage to
find a way to make money from adding something to my work. But, it does seem
like lots of people a) do object and b) seem to think that there is some
serious possibility that their work might make someone else rich without them
getting in on the action. Of course those of us who've studied copyright and
copyleft understand that copyright often favours exactly this kind of
exploitation (see the Queen song: Death of Two Legs, for example) while
copyleft has a built in limiter.
(*) it's possible - I have an undergrad textbook for which I get modest
royalties and I COULD register with the UK's copyright licensing authority to
get some modest payments if I could be bothered.