Make money from services, not tyranny (Score 1)

But how does it put food on the table? If I have some wonderful idea, shouldn't I be entitled to make some money from it? Without some form of ownership of ideas, someone else can simply take my idea and use it and not give me a thin cent. I'm stuck saying "do you want fries with that?" Uncool.

You make money from it not by artificially restricting the free flow of ideas, but by providing something that only you can provide: a service or concrete product based on your great idea (and the great ideas of others before you). One often hears adages like "people don't pay for computers and software, they pay for solutions"; you become a provider of solutions, by putting together the free ideas and presenting something in a form people actually want. By saying "do you want fries with that?".

[Red Hat] only make money from that name recognition because they are the only ones who get to sell that product package with that name. If just anybody could clone the disks and manuals and sell it, people will do so and the market will shift until nobody is making any more money than they could putting the cash in a savings account. Bye-bye finance for open source. The Red Hat distro becomes a commodity product, just like nails and pencils.

Funny you should say that; I've bought many Red Hat CDs from vendors other than Red Hat, with exactly the same content I could have got from Red Hat. Many independent distributions are based on the Red Hat one. The software they distribute is under a license that ensures that can happen. It was *already* a commodity product, long before Red Hat got there.

So how do Red Hat put food on the table? Because that name recognition is a powerful thing, and because they sell the services of collating, assembling, packaging, distributing and supporting those free ideas. It is in their best interests for those ideas (software) to be spread as far and wide as possible, because that's not their product. Their product is a service, and without the ideas being freely available, their product doesn't exist.

Without any form of ownership of IP, all licensing, EVEN THE GPL, is gone.

Without any form of IP, the GPL is redundant; the entire purpose of the GPL is to *remove* the IP restrictions from the licensed software.

The essay's argument stands. IP is an artificial restriction on something that by its nature cannot be restricted. To gain by restricting the freedom of others is tyrrany.

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