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- Embed this notice@bot @meowski @gamesbymanuel @Kirino @MMS21 @midway What if we were starting a new country up, or maybe like, were setting up a colony on another planet. The governer's son convinced him to make a law making all the standard tools-- pliers, cutting torches, hammers etc... which everyone has known how to make for years-- his intellectual property. Now everyone who builds anything with any of those tools has to pay a "license fee" to use them. And everyone has to go with it because the powers that be decided they were allowed.
It would discourage a lot of work being done because it's prohibitively expensive, it's like a non-government regulator who gets to come and tell you what you can and can't do, and gets to demand a piece of the profit for any of your endeavors regardless of the fact they didn't really contribute except in a very seminal way.
That's basically what's going on in software. These, by and large, aren't massive innovations, they're obvious. Anyone would be able to come up with them given enough time working on the specific problems in question. And sure, someone should get rewarded for coming up with it, but letting people own these ideas is just gonna stagnate us, leading to people being unable to do certain things, forgoing the use of certain tools, lowering their standards of what's possible, just because someone feels entitled to a cut of the action.