Possibilities for commercial software?

[David Schlesinger]

>It may seem obvious to you that copyright law is about protecting
>authors...

Only because it says so, right there in the US Constitution: Congress is granted the right to enact statutes "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

As I said, it's about securing for authors the exclusive right to control who gets to make copies of their works. The GNU Foundation benefits from, and relies on, copyright law every bit as much as the members of Metallica do.

If it weren't for copyright law, someone who (ab)used GPL-licensed code and refused to release the sources for their modifications could do so with impunity.

That case to which you refer "reportedly" took place in the Sixth Century. Not BC, admittedly, but I still think it's of extremely limited relevance here.

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