Perhaps this will go nowhere with us outsiders talking about it back and forth, but if you follow his anecdote through, it wasn't (necessarily) that the printer driver didn't come with sources. It was that when he found someone who had a copy of the source, and he asked for it, he said he couldn't share it because he agreed not to.

To the extent that copyright is used to prevent spreading of such knowledge—so that even those who do have access to the source and are willing cannot share it—FSF must be against copyright (and it doesn't make a difference as far as its mission goes whether copyleft dominates the world or copyright (at least on technical materials as software) is abolished).

Now, as far as secrets (such as source code) can be kept without copyright protection, namely, trade secret and all those NDAs, I frankly don't know which way FSF would go. Copyleft doesn't help in this case (after all, since it's secret how is anyone going to know whether copylefted material has been used? Enough changes in the code, and the traditional methods to spot GPL violation may not work), and copyright doesn't matter.

Until we see an authoritative source saying clearly one way or another, i.e. whether FSF would have no copyleft or copyright at all than copyright balanced with copyleft, it's just a speculation—speculation based on more than 20-year old anecdote that some say are not factual anyway.

P.S. One could argue that we should do away with copyright and outlaw NDAs ... but I feel that outlawing of something like a nondisclosure agreement would be outright unconstitutional with its infringement on the freedom of contract.

Well, I don't speak for FSF either, but I will say that I support FSF because I also believe that FSF would rather see copyright (at least ones on software) abolished than to keep its leverage of copyleft.

If I ever see evidence that's not the case, well, FSF would lose my support.

Because BSD-like license will not motivate the big players to abolish copyright. The only way to get traditional backers of copyright to oppose copyright on certain things is to poison it—and copyleft is exactly that. If enough software libraries and tools are under copyleft, and the big players want to use them without putting their own work under copyleft (or paying for separate license, if such option is available), then the only way is to abolish copyright.

Using BSD-like license (which is little better than just putting it in public domain) will just let the big players keep trampling on you.

Er, no. It's "small government is better (for everyone)" versus "government should do what the most people demands".

And you know what? The government (or the elite that does the governing) should know better than hoi polloi. What the public demands often is not what is good for them—and high taxation of "the rich" falls into that category.

The argument libertarians and free market advocates make is that "free market" is the option that does the most good for the most people (in fact all the people), as well as those who have the initiative to earn their money. (Note, we don't support government subsidies or contracts—we think there should be less of that too.)

So far, the only argument I heard is how people feel jealous and that makes them "unhappy". You know, I would bet those studies and surveys that "found" this trend were probably badly designed—hampered by political bias of whoever that ran them. They probably didn't mention the downside of being the person who makes $20,000 in a society where everyone else makes $10,000 compared to being the person who makes $30,000 in a society where everyone else makes $80,000.

I, for one, am glad that there are rich people who make the stuff I enjoy using. I am glad that someone made money developing DVDs, high-storage hard drives (who could've thought of a portable 500 GB hard drive 30 years ago?). I am glad that there are some companies that are making fortunes on GPS so that I can have my handheld GPS.

And I say this as a graduate student who makes less than $30,000 a year (at the moment, anyway).

If there are mentally unstable people who can't be happy that everyone is better off (just some people who took the initiative tad bit more than others; there is diminishing return effect when you have more money), why should we make radical changes to our free society to accommodate them?

Using that same logic, in classrooms we shouldn't give A's or A+'s to anyone because that makes people who got B's unhappy.

There are a few things that the government should concern itself with (such as national defense, and maybe making sure that no one actually starves from lack of food). Doing the bidding of the jealous public isn't what a free government should do—it's what a totalitarian state or a "democracy" led by demagoguery and mob justice would do.

These people who are so jealous that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are doing so well had the exact (well, almost, on a logarithmic scale) same resources and could've done that themselves. They should be held responsible for what they didn't do, and that's what the "gap" between the rich and the poor is about. As long as this "gap" isn't killing them or preventing them materially from overcoming it by their own effort, the government should do absolutely nothing.

Inflation doesn't make cell phones. Inflation doesn't build the Internet. Inflation doesn't make technologies that make producing essential goods cheaper.

A good metric of how well off people are is percentage of their income people spend on food (this metric works everywhere except for France). In a country that's barely-scraping by, people will be spending 100% of their "income" on food, because they are just trying not to starve. In a developed country, typically people spend less and less (as a fraction of their income) on food and other essential items and more on luxuries and things that they don't really need.

And I'd dare say that people do spend more—as a fraction of their income, so it is already adjusted for inflation—on things that they don't need these days than they did several decades ago.

Wrong. The existing armaments can destroy the world many times over. The cost of producing them is peanuts compared to what we already spend on foreign aids and welfare.

Just look at United States. Right now, even with all the expenditures related to the war in Iraq, the military budget of United States (which outstrips military budget of any other country) is less than $700 billion. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the welfare budget (this is for a different year, and without all the "stimulus" funding), we spent $600 billion on Social Security, $380 billion on Medicare, $200 billion for Medicaid, and $320 for unemployment for total of at least $1500 billion on welfare programs federally.

This is how much we are spending to "feed the poor" in the United States and that's crippling our nation. Can you imagine what would happen if we tried to do that for, what, 1, 2, or 3 billion more people?

The liberal media would have you believe that we spend too much for military and armaments. Maybe we do—we sure spend much, much more than before the world wars. But compared to other spendings like those on social programs, it's really peanuts, and before we talk about removing our only defense from our enemies, we should talk about letting each person take responsibility for his action and not burdening the society for his (or his father's) laziness.

It depends on what you mean by "pollution". If you mean nasty stuff like ozone (at the surface level; not up there where it blocks UV) or other things that used to come out of tailpipes and factories, sure, I don't think anybody is against reducing these nasty pollutions (that's what the catalytic converters and all those filter things are for).

But, what's really insidious about the "global warming" crowd is that they got people to think about carbon dioxide (CO2) as a polluting gas. CO2 is not pollution. Sure, you can get CO2 poisoning, but then, you can also die from eating too much salt or sugar (or water on the flip side). CO2 per se is not toxic, it's not "pollution". You breathe it out, and plants need them for photosynthesis.

So, that's what the debate is about, because any time you burn something other than hydrogen, you are going to generate CO2, and to scrub it out of the emission, it will just cost too much (way more than filtering other, actually noxious gas out).

There have been no studies that linked slightly elevated level of CO2 in the atmosphere (I think currently at 200 to 500 ppm or so; it takes about 1%, or 10,000 ppm for anyone to feel anything) to any harmful effect on long term health.

So once we get rid of all the nasty stuff that everyone agrees we should get rid of, the debate is really down to, "Should we bother with this innocuous gas CO2 where the only concern is some unproven possible effect on global climate?"

And I would say most reasonable people I know around me (mostly physics professors) say "No" to that question.

I think you are looking at the wrong metric. The basis of trickle-down economics is "rising tide raises all boats".

The real metric you should be looking at is the absolute quality of the life of those in lower-middle class (or even those who might be below "poverty line").

Are they better off now than they were 30 years ago? Definitely. Is this due to free market economy or due to better technologies (either as a product of free market or government-subsidized activity)? That's debatable.

If you are looking to "reduce the gap" between the rich and the poor, free market is a very poor tool—communism has shown that it can reduce the gap between the rich and the poor (mainly by making everyone, or nearly everyone, poor). What free market advocates claim is that free market is more efficient and productive. This is done by putting capital into the hands of those who know how to use it (what you see as "concentration of wealth" is a feature, not a bug), and the end result is that (this is what free market advocates claim) even though the poor may seem poorer compared to the rich, they are better off than they would have been if the government stifled all this economic activity.

The gap between the poor and the rich is not the right metric to look at if you want to genuinely see if a particular policy promotes prosperity. It's the absolute well-being that matters, not the relative one.

Well, it may be impossible for copyright per se to be unconstitutional. But particular kinds of copyright act can be unconstitutional.

For one, the constitution only allows for copyright (i.e. monopoly) for limited time. In the last century, the law makers repeatedly extended copyright retroactively so that the duration of copyright became "limited" in name only (if you could call author's life plus 70 years "limited" in the first place).

That would be—and should have been—unconstitutional.

But unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason Lessig lost the case and the Supreme Court ruled that these retroactive extensions were all perfectly constitutional.

I am a liberal because I subscribe to political beliefs of individual civil rights and freedoms.

That's not what makes you a liberal. It just markes you as "not a social conservative".

Plenty of groups that truly despise liberals (even more so that social conservatives do), such as libertarians and their ideological cousins, believe in the same thing you just said: individual civil rights and freedoms.

What really sets you apart as "liberal" (I do not mean it in the classical sense—the "classical liberal" includes both contemporary liberals and libertarians) in your stance on fiscal/economic policy.

If you believe that you have to tax the rich to give it to the poor ("spread the wealth"), then you are a liberal. If you believe that everyone should have equal chance to succeed, but beyond that the role of the government must be minimized, then you are a libertarian (or, at least, not a "liberal" in the contemporary sense).

Slashdot, for example, despite its Democratic bias (at least that of the editors), is supposed to have a libertarian vent to it, rather than liberal—and that's why Obama was not and is not wildly popular here.

Well, he was a community organizer after all ...

The figure I was talking about the amount of money U.S. spends per pupil for public schools. i.e. the government money, the tax money (not all federal; I think more than half comes from local taxes like property tax).

The perceived failure of public school system is the failure of the government, yet another evidence why we shouldn't trust it with more money, more power, and more spending discretion. Catholic schools, on the other hand, are doing well, and guess what, they are teaching evolution (compared that to some public schools in certain states).

There are very few things that the government does well or even should try to do (the few things being making war or arresting criminals). Anything else should be done by private citizens, who are the most qualified people to judge exactly how their money should be spent—tax takes that power away from them, and that's why it's evil, even with the supposed "representation".

Yes, keep repeating the lies.

As for the education, U.S.A. spends more per student than any other country (including the socialist European ones). If there are any problems with the public school system, it's not a matter of funding, as you suggest.

As for health care, why is it that nearly all new, more effective drugs are invented by American companies and, all over the world, for the best medical care money can buy, people come to America?

Socialism may help you provide leeches and substandard medical care to all the masses, but it's only by the brilliance of capitalism and individualism that good medical technologies can be invented in the first place. Whether you can afford it, well, the free market is still the undisputed, most efficient resource allocation mechanism (if central planning could even begin to compete, U.S.S.R. would've won the Cold War). Those whose lives are worth the cost of the system will be able to afford the care they need.

There's the saying (in fact, you can buy a T-shirt saying this at Washington D.C. airports): "I love my country. It's the government I'm afraid of."

America is the greatest country in the world in the human history, and it's precisely because it was the only country to celebrate individualism for what it was—the only practical way to promote collective good, given that men are men and angels do not govern.

America (the people, that is, not the bureaucrats or politicians in D.C.) will even be greater if she has more money (naturally), and one of the ways to do that is to reduce the amount of money taken by the government, and the easiest way to do that is to reduce tax, and the easiest way to reduce tax is to cut income tax, which is also the best way to uplift the middle class—there's no easy, arbitrarily set invisible line that separates the middle class from the ultra rich, and given that the ultra rich do not, as a group, pay so much tax anyway (or so you claim), cutting all income tax will help the middle class most, the exact group you want to help.