At this point, I don't buy an argument that the "open source" folks are on the angelic side of the socialist-capitalist divide, while Bill Joy and Sun are in the pits of exploitation hell. Open source folks have embraced billion-dollar IPOs, collaboration with megacorporations and increasingly (Richard Stallman to the eccentric contrary) an ideology of libertarian anti-government attitudes that frankly make the whole open source model suspect. If open source just evolves as a little free open space that binds together mega-capitalist endeavors through unified standards, it is hardly as radical as its proponents claim.
Nathan Newman -------------------
No argument and I didn't intend to take specific sides on this. And, I agree both sides are toying around the fringes of get rich quick schemes through various forms of control and exclusion.
But embedded in this weird copyright design controversy is the question of how to position publicly funded research, general intellectual goals of science, and government-corporate control of the fruits of both.
My guess is that what Bill Joy was doing in the early discussions of unix license designs was trying to find some ethical ground between selling his publicly funded knowledge and research completely over to a corporate agenda of exclusion, protection, and control, and just giving it out for others to do the same thing.
This bargain which he struck, embodied in the BSD license design between what is in concrete fact a publicly funded (bought and paid for by taxes) production, and his awareness that this economic system will absolutely exploit the fruit of that production for maximum profit--to the exclusion of any other public benefit---that bargain was with the devil. It is an illusion to believe there is any ethical ground to find.
Behind all this difficult to sort out slime is the federal legislation that changed publicly funded university copyright and patent systems. (Bythe-Dole Bill?). For an long list of the legal background see:
http://cyber.findlaw.com/ip/copyright.html
Now, in a certain way, although I love FreeBSD, computer software, technology and cyberspace isn't really important enough to lay awake nights over. What is really at stake is the more general field of science and its relation to capital and government. See, I think Joy believed the physicists who made their bargains with government in the 30's and 40's to develop nuclear weapons were acting in the best interests of some greater good. He then sees his own work in comp sci, and other's in genetics, robotics and other techno-scientific endeavors in a parallel position to that of the physicists. He believed that it was possible to define an ethical ground, just as they did. But the ethical problem isn't between the good and evil of knowledge. The problem is we live in a world dominated by institutions that are completely indifferent to any definition of good. Ethics, tech-noir futures, human misery and death of wholes species are all irrelevant because the world is run by money and power and the consequent needs of both. There are no ethically bound institutions, that's the problem.
Chuck Grimes