Replies

I'm making an attempt to understand your posture, thing I find hard to do, so please don't take my argument as an attack.

You said, with a bit of edition for clarity and conciseness, "Want to share's America's wealth (referring to intellectual property) for free"

As I've seen on your posts lately, your argument is "America should keep some information as a secret from the rest of the world, because given information represents a competitive edge".

If the exact same information (the "how to do" as in "how to schedule through eight processors", without the full implementation) contained in Linux were published as a book, would your argument still be the same?

Thank you very much for your respectable post. If I seem irritable, it's simply because I've had to endure unlimited personal attacks from those who feel their own personal legal access to the foreign clones may eventually be jeopardized as our government wakes up to the dangers of open source and especially GPL-licensed software. It's very similar to the hostility shown by those who are dependent on getting their music downloads for free from pirate websites, and you'll notice it's often many of the same characters arguing in protest.

As for your question, yes, I believe you summarized my concerns quite well, America's technological lead is at stake, and when we give our secrets away to foreign governments without reward it's dangerous to our competitive edge. Regarding the "book" question, specific software routines published in reading materials most typically have retained copyright, at least until recently. And the most sophisticated processes, again typically created by our government or for-profit US businesses, weren't available in print due to the loss of technology to others, that may have ultimately returned as a competitor or adversary.

Open source proponents will tell you that copyright remains on their code, which isn't correct in the practical sense, as copyright historically has been used to protect one's work from the use by others, and from infinite duplication. Open source licenses like GPL are actually better defined as "copyleft", and the author loses all control of that code to anyone who wishes to use it.

Hope this answers your question, and thanks again for it.