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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