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Alexandre Oliva: software in the public domain
Quoting: software in the public domain —
Fifty years after the infamous open letter to hobbyists, selling permissions to do nothing that requires permission has turned into a very profitable business model. Micro-Soft got renamed and grew into a very powerful monopoly abuser.
But since it's 50 years after the letter, the program it referred to, published the previous year, 1975, has now fulfilled the purpose of granting exclusive copyrights in the first place: it has finally been integrated in the public domain in Brazil. Rejoice! As long as you can still find a copy of that program, presumably on paper tape, and a computer capable of running it, you don't need anyone's permission to copy it, or to run it, in Brazil.
Adapting it would be more of a challenge without access to source code. IMHO, copyrights over software should have to be registered with the complete corresponding sources, for the sources to be made available to the public when the software went into the public domain, so that the people's public domain rights wouldn't be curtailed by such artificial limitations as deprivation of source code.
It's crazy that, despite 50 years' being the bare minimum, copyright over software lasts that incredibly long. I'm a grey-bearded grandfather now, and my granddaughter is older than I was when this program was first published. Computers of that era belong in museums.
It feels like granting such long exclusive rights over software is some sort of scam, given how little the sourceless program contributes to the public domain after so much time. Without sources, even in the public domain, it remains nonfree software, so it's not so much of a contribution as it is detrimental to community.
Even the ability to copy and run such public-domain programs may be rendered useless by the abusive trend of requiring permission from the operating system vendor to install programs: even if, 50 years from now, you could still find a working portable tracking device (some people call them smartphones; what kind of user does it take to find them smart?), how would you get permission to install programs on it when the TRApp store is long gone, and so is the proprietary networking infrastructure generation the device is compatible with, that you'd depend on to contact the store?
Now, other jurisdictions didn't set the term of copyrights over software to WTO's bare minimum. There are places where it could last for unimaginable 120 years. This means that a hypothetical program released by a corporation the same year as Einstein's special relativity theory got published, 1905, would have entered the public domain this year, 2026. That's insane!