While I love the spirit of this idea, it gets complicated fast. Worlds adrift is a great example. The game’s server was created using some closed source libraries with a paid license. So when the owning company (Bossa Studios?) went under, they were unable to open source it.

A law like this would effectively kill all licensed software that isn’t a full product. I do agree though; we need a solution

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 13 points 9 months ago (6 children)

A law like this would effectively kill all licensed software that isn’t a full product

What I'm hearing is: this law needs to be a constitutional amendment.

[–] Lodra@programming.dev 12 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Hmm I may be confused. Do you believe that software companies shouldn’t be allowed to build and sell libraries? I.e. They should only be allowed to sell full products, ready for an end user?

[–] pimento64@sopuli.xyz 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes.

I am aware that this would kill SaaS overnight, that's an intended feature.

[–] Lodra@programming.dev 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Fair enough regarding sass, though I disagree with the opinion.

But I’m asking about builders of partial software. For example, consider a single developer that builds a really great library for handling tables. It displays a grid, displays text in cells, maybe performs some operations between cells, etc. On its own, this software is useless but is very useful for other people to build other products. Should it be illegal to sell this software?

[–] eluvatar@programming.dev 1 points 9 months ago

I agree with you.

Though I would say that the grid software on its own IS useful. It's useful to developers, otherwise they wouldn't use it. Saying it's useless is like saying a hammer is useless because it's not a house, it's only good for building a house (among other things).

load more comments (3 replies)

load more comments (11 replies)