Recordings of thoughts can be duplicated at will, and so are not scarce.
Before someone points out that money is a recording of a promise, I'll mention that multiple recordings of a contract don't make multiple contracts :)
> So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way
If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
Yeah, but fractional-reserve banking ;) I'll stop here before we beat this dead metaphor any longer.
> If the law is strange, maybe abolishing is a reasonable reaction? We could conceivably have laws placed at a better step in the pipeline.
I think pretty much everyone is in agreement with "the law is not great and we should change it", possible most of all the GNU folks. The issue is that this change is slow to come (and somewhat unclear whether it will come at all?) The whole point of the GPL is to use copyright law as a weapon until we can make a world where copyright law doesn't need to exist–I guess a sort of world where you keep around a military in the hopes that at some point people will realize war is useless and we should all be friends. So not using copyleft is being a pacifist (actually, I think this very word appears in the post) but the point is that if you're doing that you're kind of sitting around hoping for a better world while people with guns come and steal your stuff. Which is a valid position, I guess, but I don't think you should be surprised when people come up to you and ask, "why?"
Money as a physical item is tangible, money as a ledger entry has more complicated rules of “ownership”. For example, you do not actually own the money in tour bank account, you have a claim on the assets of your bank equal to the amount on the ledger. Other forms of ledger money are equally bizarre in the limit. Suppose you use a weak address with bitcoin and someone transfers “your” bitcoin to a different account. Its not clear that they committed a crime and there is no recourse for the former “owner.” Similar cases abound with ETH.
No you don't, just like you can't own a kilogram or a mile. Money is the government-approved measurement unit for value.
Surely you own money?
> It's not about the work required to create it or even the work required to copy it. The point is that it's not scarce.
Right, the copying part is "free". The thing that software licenses try to protect, the part which is not free, is the effort that goes into making software. The end product is not scarce, but the materials that go into it are. So the thing that these licenses are doing is slapping on a "price" at a strange step in the pipeline–but only because copyright law is strange that way, and for open source projects it is hard to add value to the creation process anyways.