In such a system, companies, not
hackers, held the automatic advantage.
Proponents of software copyright had their
counter-arguments: without copyright, works might
otherwise slip into the public domain. Putting a
copyright notice on a work also served as a statement
of quality. Programmers or companies who attached their
name to the copyright attached their reputations as
well. Finally, it was a contract, as well as a
statement of ownership. Using copyright as a flexible
form of license, an author could give away certain
rights in exchange for certain forms of behavior on the
part of the user. For example, an author could give
away the right to suppress unauthorized copies just so
long as the end user agreed not to create a commercial offshoot.
It was this last argument that eventually softened
Stallman's resistance to software copyright notices.
Looking back on the years leading up to the GNU
Project, Stallman says he began to sense the beneficial
nature of copyright sometime around the release of
Emacs 15.
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