I should add That I fully support people's right to copyright and patent protection, if someone does the hard work, then they deserve to reap the benefits. As for software should not be copyrighted, we have already an open source industry, we also have many people building products which they then copyright, and so they should, it's thier money and time that produces the product, if we lost this protection we would not have this blog site, notr would we have Object Desktop, people deserve to be paid for their hard work, and have the comfort that they will not have some lazy bastard come along and cahs in on their hard work and investment of time, money and interlect. If I write a peice of software, or a book or would be pretty pissed off if someone came along and reaped the rewards of my hard work, this is why we have these laws. I dare say that those who believe otherwise would cahnge their tune in the same position. Having said this I applaud the Open Source community for their contribution to the advancement of technology, but peole need to understand that these people do this because they want to, and in many cases in their spare time, so do not rely on the returns for them to earn a living, many others work for companies that support Open Source, these companies may give the software away for free, but they still charge for the support and service of these products, and still have some degree of protection on the technology and work they have put into refining these products. People who expect that all software should be free, really don't understand that if this was the case we would be still working with punch cards, and commodore 64s, technology advancement relies of billions of dollars of investment , this would never happen if the product could then be pirated by whomever, for their own gain. On the other side if the argument, just because a peice of technology may be redundant by the time the patent expires, does not mean the underlying technology is still not in use in more advanced products. If you want free software, then there's pelenty about, whicj in many cases then goes on to become technology we use, which at some stage has a patent or copyright attached.
