While I believe that open source will eventually win out, closed-source software currently has the huge advantage of utilizing far more resources.

Many programmers are wasting their time re-implementing the same algorithms and frameworks in every software project, because they cannot use the already existing ones (which are closed-source), but there are simply so many of them, because copyright allows this waste to be hugely funded.

If copyrights are abolished, Opensource/Free Software will find far more funding, so open source software (the only kind that doesn't bitrot, and thus the only kind that matters in the long range) will progress far faster.

I find it laughable that you think there's little remaining to research about software, or that software is in any meaningful way "mature".

Software research in core fields such as OS's and languages has been going on well up to 1979, and then there was a long pause with no progress for about 15-25 years, and now we're seeing some renewal of interesting software research (EROS-OS and Coyotos, Haskell and related languages, Erights) made possible by the Internet and Free Software movement.

But I am pretty confident that the reason software progress almost halted for a few decades is because software copyrights consolidated a big and powerful closed-source industry that did everything it could to lock everyone into their platforms by making interoperability difficult, which also makes progress and change difficult.

Software did advance more and more rapidly before software copyrights were involved.

I disagree. Unix is far from the "right way" to create OS's. Various research projects prove that. However, the copyright regime has pretty much subsidized a huge industry that has everything to benefit from locking you to the current platforms (the various closed-source Unix clones and Windows).

Without copyrights, OS research could have continued and not be virtually abandoned due to "no hope to catch on in a Unix/Windows world".

Your experience is very different to that of the rest of us.

Closed nvidia and ATI drivers break all the time and cause infinite pain to kernel developers. They're also a big source of kernel crashes and makes them highly un-debuggable.

If corporations and other profit-seeking entities were not involved, free and open source software wouldn't have gotten anywhere.

You are ignorant and wrong. Software up to 1979 was not copyrighted (it was an "innovative" use of copyright by Bill Gates at the time that started this trend).

Many interesting software advances: OS design (Multics, Unix, etc), programming language design (Lisp, C) were all done without software copyrights and were really "open source" or "Free Software" by today's definitions.

If anything, the involvement of for-profit corporations using closed-source has crippled the progress of software, as you would expect exponential progress in a field such as software, but arguably software progress has slowed down since 1979.

Then you should be thankful that he does CARE that it is free as in freedom. Because if everyone did what you did, we'd be stuck with free-as-in-beer crap (i.e: Crappy closed-source drivers, flash plugins, OS's) with no interoperability, tuned for the corporates' benefit rather than your benefit, etc.

Only caring about getting your immediate work done, and not caring at all about encouragement of the right kinds of software in the future is short-sighted and actually damaging to the causes.

You keep the meme of kuro5hin alive... :-)

The code was already found on a public FTP site by the founder of blackboxvoting.org

The code is totally insecure, and has many vulnerabilities.

Rest assured, there are multiple ways to rig the voting machines.