Post #946710

2026-04-02 12:25 UTC

I knew it was this way but it&#39;s really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.

Replies (2)

@relistan@mstdn.social 2026-04-02 13:16

@aredridel Yeah and patent law has flipped 180 degrees: a way to effectively prevent anyone from ever competing with you instead of giving you a narrow window of exclusivity in return for disclosing what you did.

Open ##1757843
@mnl@hachyderm.io 2026-04-02 13:18

@aredridel as if copyright as a hack to open more sourcecode through the GPL has worked in the last 20 years. All I've seen in practice is that there companies will rather build shitty in-house replacements of GPL'd software than open any of their own source. I am absolutely flabbergasted, as someone who wants everybody to get value out of their computational devices, to get them to do what they want when they want on their own terms, and seeing how LLMs facilitate exactly the kind of "a single html file with local storage application that i share with my friends" malleable software so often dreamed of, to then be "but i have copyright on this pedestrian piece of software that presumably is 'remixed' by LLMs so no." and then attacking everybody studying and using the tools as "hubris driven tech bros wanting to keep their toys" when no, I want everybody to play with my toys.

Open ##1757844