> Without these rules we'd be stuck drowning in an even larger and blander sea of retellings and reimaginings
This experiment has been run in the form of open source software. The point of the GPL license, and other open source licenses, is to remove the restrictions of copyright from a work, and encourage people to reuse it, copy it, share it, modify it, etc.
Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software? Was the Xi Editor (RIP https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...) a bland remix of ed? Even moreso than proprietary editors like sublime text?
Has there been no progress in Haskell, an open source language, due to the lack of copyright's limitations? Is all non-bland (spicy?) innovation in software done under copyright, and licensed out to other developers so they may enjoy some type system or language?
Open source software to me seems like a very clear counter example to your fear.
> Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software?
By all means, yes! There are so many open source clones of proprietary software, lots of stuff that is solved, but fun to rewrite, so people do it. How many pointless gnome themes are there? How many web servers, media players, databases?
That’s survivor bias. The number of bland, irrelevant forks on GitHub far outnumbers the few relevant projects, it’s just that we, as software developers, have found ways to ignore those as we sift through options.
This experiment has been run in the form of open source software. The point of the GPL license, and other open source licenses, is to remove the restrictions of copyright from a work, and encourage people to reuse it, copy it, share it, modify it, etc.
Has open source software ended up as a "larger and blander" sea of software "retellings" compared to proprietary software? Was the Xi Editor (RIP https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...) a bland remix of ed? Even moreso than proprietary editors like sublime text?
Has there been no progress in Haskell, an open source language, due to the lack of copyright's limitations? Is all non-bland (spicy?) innovation in software done under copyright, and licensed out to other developers so they may enjoy some type system or language?
Open source software to me seems like a very clear counter example to your fear.