[Discuss] Govt Source Code Policy

[ingegnue at riseup.net (IngeGNUe)]

On 04/07/16 20:37, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 4/7/2016 6:19 PM, IngeGNUe wrote:
>> But what I can say is that I think the government in its role as a
>> public institution should, befitting its role, share its code (public
>> property) publicly, but also that it should have the right to defend its
>> code from unexpected privatization. Corporations should be forced to buy
>> rights to proprietize said code through the same process of
>> privatization as they might purchase a road.
> 
> I think you haven't thought this through. When a company purchases a
> road from a town or state they buy exclusive rights to it. The public
> no longer have any rights to use that road because it is no longer a
> public road. If you apply this to software then when a company buys
> software from the government they buy exclusive rights to it. The public
> would no longer have rights to use that software because it would no
> longer be public software.
> 
No, that's exactly what I mean by privatization.

The corporation can choose to restrict people from using the private
road, or not -- they can, if they so choose, let people use their
private road, for free, for a price, under certain (legal) conditions,
or not at all.

Then when you get into issues like DRM there's a convergence as well,
where the user is blocked from using the software at all.

There's a certain hesitation to make the property comparison, but I
think it's partially correct (the 'ware' part of soft-ware).