Free As In Talking Beer

In Technology Review, Lawrence Lessig and Richard Epstein are debating intellectual property, free software, and digital rights management.

Comments

[SP]

This is just one essay. After about five minutes of trying to figure out where the rest of the debate is, I gave up. For a technology magazine, these folks sure do have piss-poor navigation on their site.

[Jesse Walker]

SP: There's three links in my post, each going to a different essay.

[Shawn Smith]

Sandy,

The "freedom" to be required to put my changes back into the commons?

Only if you wish to distribute the work you derived from already GnuGPL-covered code. If you don't like those terms, don't derive work from GnuGPL-covered code. It's copyrighted, not patented, so it shouldn't be too hard coming up with your own implementation, maybe even by translating the algorithm to another computer language. Because you can look at the code, it may even be able to give you ideas that you wouldn't have with proprietary solutions.