This isn't "ridiculous". If other people could benefit from the code in question, it seems like at least some of them might be willing to pay for it. Why throw open your vault doors to the public for free when you can charge admission and there are people who want what's inside badly enough to pay?
Twitter, Facebook, et al, could probably make money off of all the stuff they open source. But they don't, because it's not their business.
It's may be an unpopular opinion but it's not off topic nor offensive. Please don't downvote for popularity reasons.
copyright assignments are the standard way to achieve this (and then some, which they might not actually care about - but since it doesn't hurt...)
If I go to a restaurant and order a meal, and the waiter decides that's a good opportunity to invite his friends to eat from my plate, I'd find this a good opportunity to walk out without paying a dime.
It is more like you order something from the chef, and once he made it once he can hand out exact duplicates instantly to anyone else who walks through the door forever without any resource consumption. In that situation, it is ridiculous to try to charge everyone that walks through the door the costs of the scarce resources when there are no resource constraints at all anymore.
In software, the resource constraint is developer time and effort. The resultant information from the labor is not scarce, and others will gladly redistribute it for you (see: torrents, public repositories, usenet) so there are no costs (in time, or resources) to provide it.
So you could either be an asshole and let people starve on the street while you eat your fancy dish while the chef has an infinite number of copies of it sitting on the drysink, or you could let people come through, grab some grub, and enjoy it like you did, even though you paid for the initial copy to be made, it takes nothing away from you to let others benefit from your investment. If anything, people will be gracious to you for investing to make the infinite food dish happen, and you should expect good karma to come back in turn.
1. Fuck supporting your software though, your time is not free. If people keep calling and asking questions, fuck 'em.
2. Fuck dealing with the resulting fragmentation from people forking it left and right. This would incur a very serious damage to your client as well, but fuck him too.
3. Fuck maintaining your software. Because the configurations and platforms people will be deploying your software to are nothing like the the ones your client is paying you for, so the bugs your client sees and your open source users see are nothing alike.
The point I'm driving, is that it's easy to talk about how copying code is easy. But your code is worthless without considering everything else I said above. And all I said above requires your involvement, your effort and your time.
I mean people are easy to copy too. Practically free. But for some reason, sleeping around and abandoning your children afterwards is not considered a noble act.
Well no, it isn't. You should be billing for that. If your code is entirely open, and in this theoretical example the real goal should be a post-copyright society entirely, then anyone can modify it however they want, and everyone can choose to use it if they want to or not. And if they want you to behave or act a certain way, they better make a voluntary transaction with you about it.
> 2. Fuck dealing with the resulting fragmentation from people forking it left and right. This would incur a very serious damage to your client as well, but fuck him too.
So if I fork firefox, and do whatver I want with it - ship it, etc, see Pale Moon - how exactly that does that impact anyone using firefox? I haven't touched firefox. Those guys could take some of my code if they want, in post-copyright (or just permissive or license compatible copyleft) land, and bring it into their own codebase and benefit.
But my actions using firefoxes code has no impact on firefox itself. Unless I wanted to try calling my own modified version firefox, using Mozilla branding etc, which is more slander than anything. Lying is still wrong and punishable in the post copyright society.
> 3. Fuck maintaining your software. Because the configurations and platforms people will be deploying your software to are nothing like the the ones your client is paying you for, so the bugs your client sees and your open source users see are nothing alike.
And the open source users couldn't either contribute time or resources (money, whatever) to fix them? The worst crime in open source is charity. It makes everything seem cheap, and makes few people realize the human time costs of developing tremendously large projects. Why is it that most of the popular foss projects have all their engineers on some corporations payroll, where those businesses just understand the benefit of not having to subsidize the cost of the entire product to keep it proprietary, but they still want someone working on it to suit their needs?
> The point I'm driving, is that it's easy to talk about how copying code is easy. But your code is worthless without considering everything else I said above. And all I said above requires your involvement, your effort and your time.
Copying code is free, but having a person maintain and support is not. So yeah, what is wrong with the code being worthless to some people if they don't invest in it to make it work for them? That is how software works. But it wastes a hell of a lot less human potential to have people port and maintain a shared codebase between disparate systems than to have everyone reinvent the same thing behind closed doors with no information sharing acting like 3 year olds who don't want anyone else playing in their sandbox so they put a fence around it. But you can build a much nicer sand castle when everyone works together, even if you only build a sand town of different buildings sharing the same sand roads. Analogy is now breaking down.
> I mean people are easy to copy too. Practically free. But for some reason, sleeping around and abandoning your children afterwards is not considered a noble act.
I honestly have no idea what you are saying here. Humans are atom based and thus scarce, cloning is hard, and we don't have an accurate way to rip the information stored in the brain and transfer it. Once we do, copying "people", the collective information that makes the person, would be easy, but we aren't there yet. The rest of this I literally can not understand at all, what does "sleeping around and abandoning your children" have to do with anything? It is morally reprehensible to abandon children because it is forsaking responsibility for ones actions. How does that have anything to do with information freedom?
I don't get it, though. The business wants the software - they pay to have it made. And then they also want rights to it. I really like how you have to make copyright assignment explicit in the contract, because in general it is ridiculous to write code and then lock it behind a vault door and treat it like liquid gold when other people could benefit from it.