Ubuntu Celebrates Its Ninth Birthday Amid Controversy

[movieman]

No it's not. The whole concept of open source depends on a governing body who enforces licenses, that is, there needs to be regulation of what corporations are allowed to do with open source software, to enforce copyleft. Libertarianism is more concerned with minimizing all regulation, which would also make the functioning of open source impossible.

Uh, without copyright, there'd be little need for open source licenses, because anyone who got a copy of the source for any program could use it any way they wanted. The GPL is primarily a reaction to software copyright, and many of us would be happy to see it go away if software copyright did.

[mrugiero]

Uh, without copyright, there'd be little need for open source licenses, because anyone who got a copy of the source for any program could use it any way they wanted. The GPL is primarily a reaction to software copyright, and many of us would be happy to see it go away if software copyright did.

There'd be a need, as without copyright there is no copyleft. IF you manage to find the source code of derivatives, there is no need. But what happens when you don't?

The only kind of license that would go unneeded would be the liberal license.

[movieman]

There'd be a need, as without copyright there is no copyleft..

Again, many of us only use copyleft licenses because copyright exists.

[mrugiero]

Again, many of us only use copyleft licenses because copyright exists.

Wrong. If the only reason you use a copyleft license is because copyright exists, then you don't mind people not publishing code based on your (because, again, with no regulation, nobody mandates them to), so you all would be far better with non-copyleft licenses, as BSD.