Just a small post, this time.

Shay sent me a speech about what Microsoft thinks of open-source.

I’d actually already read some repsonses to this (Richard Stallman in particuler.) Without descending too far into the murky realms of jurisprudence, I’m beginning to think that I agree with RMS on this. I’m beginning to think that the notion of “intellectual property” is utterly, utterly wrong.

I have just gone through and made sure I have no references to claiming copyright, ownership, blah, blah on anything on this site. I claim authorship of some things, and request that that authorship be acknowledged. I will also attempt to attribute authorship as much as I can. (It’s a bit hard with images from public archives.) This is how academia works, and I think it’s how the world of ideas in general should work. People who don’t attribute authorship are to be punished, but those who use something need to acknowledge the contributions of those who have gone before.

I think that’s really what Microsoft objects to. If they use any software that uses the GPL, they’re stuck having to follow it for that entire software package. As RMS says, the GPL has a propagating nature.

Anyway, I think that if I want to write any more on this, it will need a paper, which puts it in ‘after honours’ land.

Oh, and Revue went very well. Damn, the difficult jobs really are the most satisfying.