Juan Garofalo wrote:

> If you don't believe in patents and/or IP, then you must completly drop
> the license system enforced at the point of a gun. It doesn't matter if
> the 'license' to be enforced is GPL LGPL CNN FBI or whatever. 
> 
> Otherwise, all this is talk about 'free' software(meaning it's linked to
> freedom) is pure hypocrisy and is, IMO, intended to confuse people. 

Don't you think you're going a bit too far here? This sounds like any
property right would be contradictory to your idea of freedom. Of course
your property limits my freedom of movement and my freedom to use
everything out there, but on the other hand the property rights give me
(and you) the freedom of owning something. Every freedom comes at the cost
of another freedom -- there ain't no free lunch, and there is no total
guaranteed freedom. Every guaranteed freedom is a restriction of some sort.

It's perfectly possible to think that the patent system is royally screwed
up and that patents were never meant to apply to software in the first
place, and that therefore software patents (and to a certain degree patents
in general) are not a good thing (anymore) -- all the while still holding
on to the idea of copyright and maybe thinking that copyleft licenses are a
good thing.

There's no hypocrisy in this, just a bunch of different arguments. Patents
are one thing, copyright is another thing, copyleft is still another
thing...  You can think patents are not good but copyright is, you can
think copyright is good but the idea of copyleft isn't, you can think
patents are a good thing but copyleft (or -right) isn't, you can think that
patents in principle are a good thing but that it's impossible to create a
working realization of the idea... 

They are quite different concepts, have different realizations and
different rules governing them and have different effects.

Gerhard

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