Sure, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-... makes that argument (as does https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20812814). The Traitorous Eight taking Shockley's IP launched the Valley. Microsoft and Apple taking Xerox's IP (so brazenly that a movie would later call them "Pirates") launched the personal computer revolution. Google taking what the court of appeals calls Oracle's intellectual property launched Android. Illegal copies of everything from Windows to IDA Pro to Photoshop launched so many of our careers.
More specifically, the free software argument is that he should be allowed to freely take and publicize Waymo's IP even when nobody is paying him to do so, that the legitimate ends of society are better reached by not protecting software copyright at all and by encouraging work to be done in the commons. Copyright produces a reward for the first company to successfully implement some idea, but then results in that company alone being able to improve - and since they have the market cornered, they have little incentive to improve until some other company catches up with them. It is far from obvious that this produces better software, better research, or better results for society than just letting anyone build on top of anyone else's work, monetizing (if necessary) on delivering whole products with a support lifecycle instead of on code itself. Waymo and Uber will both still profit from self-driving cars even if they're not the exclusive owners of the code or research behind making them work, and even if Waymo decides to stop having their own fleet of cars, it's still valuable for others to hire the original engineering team to work on specific features.
Or, let me put this another way. Is the Levandowski case justification for software patents? Why should Uber be able to use Google's algorithms and ideas without licensing them? That's intellectual property too, isn't it?
The free software argument is neither novel nor rare in the hacker community, and I'm confused to see someone who advocates it getting such a hostile and skeptical reception here.
Well, I don't believe copyright actually protects the first company to successfully implement an idea. In the instance of cars, the goal is to have self-driving cars. Some people think LIDAR is necessary, Tesla doesn't. There are often many solutions to the same problem.
In the case of Elastic, we instead could just have services SaaS services where the source code is protected behind an API like Algolia Search instead. I realize Elastic did FOSS partially for marketing purposes, but I don't see how Amazon lifting Elastic's IP and wrapping behind a service is beneficial in the long run. It might be better, cheaper and faster today, but when Elastic goes out of business, Amazon likely would not put the same type of effort into future development and new features IMO. I do think this is different than Google, Oracle and Java. In that circumstance, Google wrote its own source code using Java versus extending Java and offering at as a "new" language. This is more closely akin to Uber leveraging Google Maps when it started.
A lot of HN’s electorate’s salaries depend upon not understanding the importance of software freedom.
After all, the server we are using to communicate is paid for with dollars made from keeping source code secret from the users of that same software.
Let’s not forget that this is first and foremost a commercial YC project. HN is not free software and its source is not available to its users. It is unsurprising that users here are hostile to the plain, objective fact that it is clearly and self-evidently impossible to own a sequence of bits in the same way one can own a physical object.
Minor point: the source code for this website is available from http://www.arclanguage.org/arc3.2.tar (see news.arc) and is free software under the artistic license.
Other than that, yes, agreed - despite the name "Hacker News," this forum is run by and for the subset of the hacker community that has a vested interest in monetizing software itself.
Oh, I definitely assume that, but I'm on the side of "you should be permitted to release / reuse source" and less so on the side of "you should be obligated to release source."
(That is, I see software copyright as a thing we should fundamentally not have just like software patents, and I see the GPL's copyleft approach as useful in a world with copyright law and I gladly write GPL software because we live in that world, but I don't think it by itself is justification to retain the leverage of copyright.)
More specifically, the free software argument is that he should be allowed to freely take and publicize Waymo's IP even when nobody is paying him to do so, that the legitimate ends of society are better reached by not protecting software copyright at all and by encouraging work to be done in the commons. Copyright produces a reward for the first company to successfully implement some idea, but then results in that company alone being able to improve - and since they have the market cornered, they have little incentive to improve until some other company catches up with them. It is far from obvious that this produces better software, better research, or better results for society than just letting anyone build on top of anyone else's work, monetizing (if necessary) on delivering whole products with a support lifecycle instead of on code itself. Waymo and Uber will both still profit from self-driving cars even if they're not the exclusive owners of the code or research behind making them work, and even if Waymo decides to stop having their own fleet of cars, it's still valuable for others to hire the original engineering team to work on specific features.
Or, let me put this another way. Is the Levandowski case justification for software patents? Why should Uber be able to use Google's algorithms and ideas without licensing them? That's intellectual property too, isn't it?
The free software argument is neither novel nor rare in the hacker community, and I'm confused to see someone who advocates it getting such a hostile and skeptical reception here.