The drama between Open Source/Linux/Apache and proprietary licensed software like Microsoft very much parallels the more tangible battle of Marxism vs. Capitalism; government ownership of everything vs. private property rights.
The Mozilla.org logo very much is reminiscent of Communist China.
The cry "information just wants to be free" is at core an attack on intellectual property (private property) rights....
Copyrights and patents were all designed to give limited exclusive use periods to the creators (or those they decided to sell their ownership to). All works were supposed to lapse into the public domain.
The way to avoid making such information public and available is to not file it with anyone (which is why some people will reverse engineer software, hardware, and recipes).
Yes ... and no. There's the larger issue of who "owns" information... the state? Microsoft? the people? Intellectual property rights may need to be protected in some new form, but I'm afraid Bill Gates and megacorporations are not the folks I want to trust with control over information access.
Seems to me that open source philosophy is just another contender in the free market.
It was these kinds of thinkers that created the internet and the web. But why quibble.
Perhaps. But, there is also a good point worth pondering in that copyrights were originally intended to be only a temporary protection, a la patents. Once the real money-making power of a work has been exhausted, say, 25 years after creation, why not expire the copyright? The principle has worked fine for patents.
Oh, and IP is a fundamentally separate concept from private property. You can't photocopy a house as you can a book, and duplicating software does not deprive the original creator of the posession of that software, only the potential income from it. They're two different things.
How long should a copyright be held?