So, anyway, I was reading the above letters, and they got me to thinking…
First of all, they constitute a ridiculous example of what happens when you start from unclear or contradictory premises. In the first half, SCO seems to be advocating that Congress should, for reasons of “the common good,” unilaterally invalidate the GPL (Gnu Public License.) When in fact, the same property rights that copyright laws protect give creators the ability to give away their product, if they so please. SCO’s current litigation contends that IBM inserted proprietary code, licensed from SCO, into Linux, thus placing it under the GPL. If this is the case, which has been, is and will continue to be the subject of a rather protracted legal battle, then SCO’s property rights were violated and they are entitled to damages. But it’s not the GPL that’s at fault, as they seem to contend.
The second half contains a slightly more cogent argument in favor of property rights, but maintains the fallacious conclusion that the GPL somehow violates these rights. It even defends the profit motive, albeit only as a means to “the public good.” What I found particularly striking was Justice Breyer’s dissenting opinion in Eldred v. Ashcroft that the clause empowering congress to enact intellectual property protections “does not exist to provide spcial private benefit, …but to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good. The ‘reward’ as a means, not an end.” The intellectual mess of the altruist ethic. The majority opinion was little better, justifying the “reward” merely as a necessary prerequisite to “artistic creativity for the general public good.”
If, in fact, FSF and RedHat are lobbying for the abolition of all IP rights in the form of software, then I couldn’t disagree more strongly with their position. That doesn’t make SCO’s opposition to GPL any more valid, for precisely the same reasons.
Lost in all of this is the only moral basis on which the discussion must proceed: the protection of private property rights, not for the altruists’ standard of “the general public good,” but in recognition of the fact that they are a necessary feature of life qua man, that each man must be free to keep or to dispose of (including to trade value-for-value) what he creates as he sees fit. Once that is accepted, the proper course, the right and the wrong, in all of the above arguments becomes clear. Certainly moreso than the current confusion brought on by a lack of any principled basis for argument.
Just had to rant.