If you're looking for some entertainment, read Darl McBride's latest tirade against the GPL. While there are indeed some people who'd really like to get rid of all intellectual property rights, his assertion or at least implication that the GPL itself is aimed at abolishing intellectual property rights is absurd. The purpose of the GPL is to empower copyright owners to give away their work if they want to, while ensuring that their gift to the world is not coopted by people who would profit from it without sharing their contributions too. The GPL is depends on copyright law and uses it to empower copyright owners to control the distribution of their work.

A common misconception about capitalism is that everything is about monetary profits--that money is everyone's motivation. Capitalism is a system that benefits society by reward people who provide others' needs and wants by giving the producers something they want. Most often, the reward is economic, true. But some capitalists are motivated by a desire to give ("philanthropists"), others by a desire for recognition (even if it isn't accompanied by copious amounts of money), others by a desire to do a particular kind of work that they find rewarding (and the money they earn enables them to do that, but the money is just a means to an end).

Darl's letter implies that people who create software for reasons other than earning profit are somehow anti-American, anti-capitalist, and even lawless. This is absurd. He states that "SCO asserts that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the U.S. copyright and patent laws." This is patently false. The GPL PROTECTS the rights of copyright owners who wish to give away their work with certain restrictions on how it can be used. Darl's attempt to abolish the GPL is no more an attack on the rights of copyright owners than the violations that SCO's lawsuit alleges.

Darl's letter overuses references to the Constitution, elected officials, and other terms and phrases obviously aimed at portraying SCO as on the side of legitimacy, American values, and lawfulness. Of course these are legitimate issues for him to make reference to in supporting is position, but sheesh! Darl, you'll sound a lot more credible if your letters don't smack so heavily of propaganda.

I myself have released some software I've created under the GPL. I give some of my work away for a few reasons: to attract people to the non-free versions of the same software, to bring people to my website where I can try to sell them something else, because I know some people will pay me to install it for them, and in some cases, because while useful, some of my products are simple enough that the price they could fetch would hardly be worth collecting. Without the GPL, I might just keep these things to myself. I don't mind people using them for free, nor do I mind them using it to create profits by its use, but I don't like the idea of people making money by selling my work after I gave it to them for free. The GPL is a tool that enables me to give my work away while preventing people from using it in ways that I, the copyright owner, don't want them to.

Does copyright protection of commercial software foster innovation? Of course. Most of the software development I've done would have been done without the profit motive (unless I were independently wealthy). Does free software foster innovation? Of course. Lots of the software I've written depends on free software like Apache, PHP, Perl, and Linux. Without these, I never could have created my software. There's room in the world, and in a capitalist economy for both. The real point is that it's the right of the copyright owner to decide how copyright law will be applied to their work.