Re: Iran, copyright, Matlab and Octave

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 10 April 2013 11:34, Thorsten Liebig <address@hidden> wrote:

> What would you say, if Mathwork would decide to include Octave in
> their commercial software and sell it and make it closed source and
> make millions with it?

There is nothing wrong with commercialising Octave, so I would be ok
with that. In fact, I would be quite happy if they or anyone else
managed to commercialise Octave. I encourage anyone to try, and I
certainly want to try myself too.

If they try to restrict Octave, which is immoral, we have legal
recourse to fight that: the GPL.

> They would probably cite your statements here and say: "Well we
> don't take anything away from you! Life with it." I think I know
> what you would say.

They aren't taking anything away from me, but depending on how they
commercialise things and how they distribute it, they could be taking
away freedom to distribute the software and study it. This would be
harmful to whoever decides to take the software, and if they want to
fight against that harm, we have the GPL on our side to do so.

> It is the Copyright that holds the GPL. Without Copyright, the GPL
> is worthless...

Copyright is a means to an end. The GPL is a hack on copyright, and a
very clever one, I must add. Copyleft: all rights reversed. Saying
that the GPL can only exist with copyright is like saying that GNU can
only exist with Linux, but we have alternative working kernels that
GNU can use:

    http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

Copyright happens to be the law that the GPL can use, but alternative
laws could be created instead. Special copyleft laws could work, for
example. We would just have to draft them and pass them on to
legislators.

You don't have to respect my wishes to use Octave. In fact, most
people don't respect my wishes, since I'm not monetarily wealthy. You
are therefore, in a way, violating my "moral rights" if I laid legal
claim to them, but I think it's more important for people to be able
to violate them than it is for me to have a lot of money. I don't
think this kind of copyright law ("moral rights") is important for
society. Authors of software are not more important than all of their
users. As a whole, society benefits more when the software is free.

- Jordi G. H.