I honestly wonder about what percentage of the toxicity of society is a result of the awful copyright regime. Certainly another good chunk is a result of the patent system being broken.
replyI guess these are not the top items in the societal problems list, but they really don't help.
The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.
replyThe rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.
replyIf you pay someone for internet access you are paying for most of that, and I’m guessing you paid for the switch and router in your own house. But I was talking about the software running on your computer that your code invokes.
replySure, and I paid for all the contributions to Linux too in that respect. It's fine, if the unpaid ones want to not do any more work, that's fine too. It was always about user freedom, and now we have it.
reply> The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit.
replyEh yes and no. The problem is I am not somebody who is comfortable building their own software, so I depend on the generous communities that create free, open source software I can reliably run on my computer. There are lots of people like me! So the benefit isn’t being able to adjust the software to my liking, it’s the knowledge that I can’t have the rug pulled out from under me as easily since I know in theory I can run the software locally, but realistically (hopefully!) somebody else is going to fork and maintain it.