pfh suggested the other day that perhaps The SCO Group's mistake is that they think of IP as property, obeying various conservation laws.
Sun's Dr Gosling has now said pretty much exactly the same thing: [Richard Stallman] has his own rather peculiar definition of "Free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved) [...]
Certainly much of the RIAA rhetoric makes the same incorrect conflation; whether due to confusion on the part of the RIAA itself, or intentionally as misdirection, I have no idea. They're talking about music rather than software, but they're making the same mistake.
Why is this a mistake?
If two people each have an apple, and they meet and exchange them, they end up with one apple each.
If two people each have an idea, and they meet and exchange them, they end up with two ideas each.
Ideas are a very different kind of property to apples, and failing to take this difference into account is a mistake. To take Dr Gosling's phrasing, apples obey the first law of thermodynamics, ideas don't. Similarly, just because Unix used to have some ideas that Linux now has doesn't mean that someone broke into the SCO offices in the middle of the night and burgled them.
Perhaps part of the blame for this rests on the phrase intellectual property itself; if the two kinds of property were called by different names, as they are in the actual laws, this confusion would probably be a lot less common.
⇦ Software components | ⇨ IBM said *what* ?! |
