My view of copyleft and thoughts about copyleft-next
Aaron Wolf
wolftune at riseup.net
Fri Jul 11 21:35:44 UTC 2025
Well, the big picture question is two parts: open vs exclusive; and
abundant vs scarce.
Each of the four combinations presents different issues.
See my whole talk about this:
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/why-our-economy-fails-public-goods-like-free-software-bf79/
So when it comes to *software* freedom, we're talking about open
abundance. So the question is whether anything *abundant* has been made
*exclusive* (i.e. "club goods"). We aren't critiquing having exclusivity
for scarce goods, though even that isn't *always* appropriate.
Yes, knowledge is abundant. And for this list, the question is how a
*copyright* license relates to freedom, and everything that is covered
by *copyright* law fits the abundant category.
So, I meant my basic framing with that premise as a given.
Cheers,
Aaron
On 7/11/25 9:54, zefr0x at tuta.io wrote:
> Jul 11, 2025, 19:07 bywolftune at riseup.net:
>
>> In my view, the overall issue of software-freedom and copyleft can be summarized as: No entity reserves practical or legal exclusive power.
>>
>>
>
>> Real software freedom means that while I might be less capable of updating a program compared to an experienced coder who already knows the software, they have provided me everything feasible that they have access to in doing such updating.
>>
>
>> There's no code or tools or legal rights that they have that I don't.
>>
>>
> "Not reserving practical or legal exclusive power" looks like a very broad definition to me, it might include everything like hardware and human resources, not just knowledge.
>
> What about this: No entity reserves practical or legal exclusive power on knowledge?
> With software as a type of knowledge including its code and design etc.
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