Re: Authors' rights (Was- R

On 5 Apr 1996, Martha Luehrmann wrote:
>
> If you didn't have copyright protection
> would you get the enormous flocks of people writing and singing music?
> Would you get the massive proliferation of novels? Would you get good
> movie scripts and adaptations?

I've also seen it suggested that there would not have been the flowering of Elizabethan literature that there was had there been copyright at that time. Many of the works that were written would be infringing by today's standards.

> Some have pointed to software as an area where you get a lot of
> creative activity despite (until lately) fairly weak protection. But
> compare professional programs with the offerings of freeware and
> shareware. The latter two are frequently rougher, cruder, more
> bug-prone, less user-friendly, and have fewer features. Not only
> that, they also show a singular lack of originality.

This is a hasty generalization. There are many very well written freeware programs that can compete with commercial products. The gcc compiler for the C programming language usually comes in the middle of the pack for optimizing compilers (though it has been some time since I have seen the comparisons). There is also a fairly large body of freeware that is produced by academics. The X Windows graphical user interface is freely available and it is pretty much the standard graphical user interface for use under UNIX type operating systems. I have recently retrieved a library of routines for the C++ computer language which was made freely available by an academic who had in the past started two separate computer companies (and was the developer of the grammar checker that is currently used in Novell products). He wished to make something publicly available in return for how well he had fared in software development over the years. This library is one of the best written of its type that I have come across (I have worked as a professional software developer in the past). I could go on with many more examples, but I will stop here assuming that I have made the point that there is a large body of well written freeware.

> Most are knock-offs of the features and user interface of the
> professional programs.

Many commercially available programs share this feature so this is not specifically a criticism of freeware or shareware. Something that you will seldom find, however, is a knock-off of a program whose source code is freely available. Someone who wishes to work on that type of software will more likely retrieve the source code, add a few features, and make the new source code available once more.

                            Steven Bosnick
                         sbosnick[_at_]uoguelph.ca
                                                            VP External
Philosophy Department                    Graduate Students' Association
University of Guelph                               University of Guelph