zlacker

You wouldn't need it if copyright didn't exist in the first place

>>jimnot+(OP)
Of course you would. For example, thanks to copyright law, Linksys was forced to share their Linux customizations to run on router hardware, which led to the creation of the OpenWRT project.

Without copyright law, any actor can take your open system and close it.

>>jimnot+(OP)
"Free Software" requires making source code available to users. If copyright didn't exist, there would not even be a hypothetical mechanism to require that of publishers.

>>AceJoh+a1
A lot of people are fine with that. Look at everyone who uses the BSD or MIT license.

>>Fillig+Q8
The fact that they have the option to choose it is different than it being the only possibility.

>>jimnot+(OP)
> You wouldn't need it if copyright didn't exist in the first place

No popular open source license that I am aware of attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation:

If there was no copyright, you could not force anybody to provide the source code of any derivative work (situation for copyleft licenses). On the other hand, in a no-copyright situation, you are not able to sue anybody who attempts to reverse-engineer such a derived binary blob and publish the reverse-engineered source code.

Thus, an open-source license that attempts to emulate a no-copyright situation would in my opinion have clauses like the following:

- you are allowed to create binary-only derived works, and are allowed to sell copies of it

- you must not sue anybody who redistributes these copies (even for money)

- you must not disallow any licensees to reverse-engineer these executables

- you must not disallow any owner of a copy to create any derivative work (even using reverse-engineering techni, as long as this work is licenses under this license. This in particular means that, if you create a derivative work, you have to take care that you cannot redistribute copies that (statically) link the work with parts for which this is disallowed