Rights vs Responsibilities (Was: To Al Kossow at bitsavers)

This is an interesting point, which I had not thought of, nor seen raised elsewhere, before. On the one hand, it's true in general that any system involving rights without associated responsibilities grows concomitant abuses. (Responsibilities without corresponding rights is a different bag of problems, but not very relevant here.) On the other hand, you need to be very careful exactly what responsibilities you impose, or this could have an even more deadening effect on software creation than existing IP law. Of course, depending on your biases and what software creation would be impacted by the details in question, you may consider such deadening a Good Thing. (For example, I personally wouldn't mind making it more expensive to create, or at least commercially distribute, closed-source software, provided it doesn't also impact open-source software.) I suspect this is a case of "ask five people, get at least six answers". This is a specious argument; not all software has anything to do with the Internet. (I don't think this will stop being so, either, despite all the Internet-of-things advocates trying to, basically, do that.) Most? All, I would say. I doubt there exists nontrivial software without bugs - and I'm not sure about trivial software, either, though it's possible a few of the smallest examples qualify. a substantial, possibly unjustifiable, cost in some cases. Consider someone making, oh, say, thermostats. They don't distribute their software except embedded within their devices. Why should they have to provide for software distribution channels? Consider the same thing, only instead of ROM code and a microprocessor core, they have a FPGA that loads its config from flash. Consider the same thing, only the FPGA config is in mask-programmed ROM. Consider it with a mask-programmed gate array instead of an FPGA. Consider the same thing implemented with discrete logic. Where do you draw the line between "software" and "not software"? Why is this a bad thing? In some cases it can be, certainly, but I'm far from convinced it always is. Your argument here, again, appears to be designed around the "end user running software on a general-purpose desktop computer" paradigm. You need to take into account the rest of the software out there if you want your changeas to be a serious contender in the real world - or at least you need to explain why it's OK to ignore those things. There's another point: copyright applies to a lot more than software. You need to make sure your changes are at least tolerable for other copyrighted things, or else you need to somehow manage to draw a line between "software" and "not-software" (a notoriously hard line to draw; consider the famous t-shirt which had an implementation of RSA bar-code printed onto it). I doubt it, largely because it seems to me that at least two of the affected groups have more or less diametrically opposed interests. (Mind you, I'd love to be proved wrong in this regard.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B