Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
But if people did not have that protection, most "creative" works would not exist, especially in fields like software writing. Most software is written as a commercial enterprise, not for the "good of society".
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I don't agree with this at all. In a few words, APACHE, BSD, LINUX. None of these softwares were written as a commercial enterprise. And, they are the best, or among the best, of their types of software.
I don't have any idea if there are "code communists" out there writing software "for the good of society," but I do know that there are many programmers writing extremely good software "for free," for whatever reason. And alot of the open source stuff is better than the commercial variety, because the code is there for all to see and comment on.
Remember the original "UNIX Wars?" AT&T vs. Berkeley. Well, big old commercial UNIX AT&T claimed that they, of course, were responsible for modern UNIX. How could a bunch of college kids have written a modern OS for free? Only a big commercial enterprise could do that.
Turned out, when the source contributions were examined, that BSD was responsible for over 90% of the code in AT&T UNIX.......