On Mon, 2006-10-16 at 00:18 -0500, Stevens wrote:
If I choose to give it away for free; i.e., make it available for all to see, then that is my choice.
That's an invalid use of "i.e.". Even if you make it available, you still retain your copyright and no one is allowed to copy it except on terms you decide. This is actually the legal basis for the GPL, so it's not against open source. You have no rights to open source code except as defined in the license. Similarly, you can make things available to read, whether it be source code or anything else, and this in itself will not yield your copyright. Just because you can read the New York Times without having to go through some sort of copy protection scheme, do you think that means you can do whatever you want with the material? But as far as anything I have on my computer is concerned - if I can't make a backup of it, it's useless to me, and to any company that is serious about data security
For example, if Intel opened their chip development to the world, just how long would they stay in business? The Chinese and AMD would cut off a very sensitive part of their anatomy and hand it to them on a silver platter. "Intellectual property" is a very real, very necessary part of the brave new world that we inhabit. Without it, innovation and creativity withers.
Um, what? "Intel clones" have been around for a few decades now, where have you been? As far as I can see, Intel is still in business. Also, you might want to discuss this with Sun, who have always made their SPARC designs available, even when they were highly successful. Lately even under a very permissive license