BeCrux

European Council Presidency adopts Software *stnetaP* Agreement against Council's Rules.

Many software developers have published their rage against this agreement, and they have all my support. We've just made our first step to intellectual regression and software development's stop.

Here I report an abstract from Namesys website, ReiserFS's developer, where they publish their point of view about this matter, which I totally agree.

Equal Source Code Access Is A Civil Right
Copyright and *tnetap* laws were invented to give you an incentive to share your knowledge with the rest of the world in return for a limited time monopoly on what you shared. That is not the way it works with software though, because software companies are allowed to keep their source code secret, but are still given monopoly rights over their software. There is little meaningful sharing of knowledge when binaries only are shared with the world, and all the rest is kept as a secret. The reasons for the existence of copyright and *tnetap* laws have been forgotten, their workings have been twisted, and greed and turf defense are what remain of them. Monopoly interests have taken laws intended to promote progress in the arts and sciences, and now use them to to further their own control over us by ensuring that innovations not theirs cannot enter the market for improvements to software.

Think of software objects as forming a society, not yet at the level of an AI society, but still a group of programs interacting, and choosing whether to interact, with each other. Think of social lockout, whether it be in the form of racial discrimination as in the civil rights movement, Mercantilism as happened a few centuries ago, or the endless other forms of division in human society. Is it so surprising that this evil casts its shadow on cyberspace? Is it so surprising that our cybershadows also find ways to engage in social lockout of others? Most of the cyber-world of software lives under tyranny today.

We are part of a movement to create a free cyber-world we can all participate equally in. Namesys does not oppose copyright laws as they were invented (14 year monopolies which disclosed everything that was temporarily monopolized), it opposes copyright laws as they have been twisted. Namesys opposes unlimited time monopolies which disclose nothing, and lockout all other inventors.

Many others in this movement are opposed to copyright law, even the version of it in which it was first created. We feel they are not acknowledging that a trade-off is being made, and that this trade-off has value.

Yet still we choose to give our software away for free for use with software that is given away for free (e.g. Gnu/Linux). Since we don't have a lot of illusions about our ability to entirely change the world, and it is amusing to sell free software, for those who do not want to disclose their software and do not want to give it away for free, we charge a license fee and let them keep their improvements to our software without sharing them. These fees help substantially in allowing us to survive as an organization.

We don't make nearly as much money as we would from charging everyone for usage rights, but we do make just enough to get by, and that is important.;-) We don't really feel that everyone should follow our example and make their software no charge for most users (it is too hard to survive fiscally doing this), but we do think that everyone should disclose their source code, and no one should design their software to exclude working with other software (e.g. Microsoft's Palladium which makes such a mockery of Athena).