alt Hacker News> every software vendor shall be obliged after some time to hand out their source code,
Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.
Access to the market is not a right but a privilege. If you want to sell things we can demand things of you.
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I see, you think actively preventing companies and individuals from interacting freely is the default. And it's a privilege allowed to?
Well I wonder who it is you think has the right to deny others the freedom to cooperate economically by default. Then, allow "privileges" so people can work together.
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Aside from that moral upside-down world, what you are describing is a steep limit on copyrights, with forced source, i.e. trade secret, reveals.
So you are removing the huge incentives that copyright creates. If software were always trivial to build, or cost very little to build, that would not be problem. In real life, that would devastate software work, and we would all be poorer for it. Companies, individual software developers, and users.
> Obviously. Since software is as much vital to the modern world as water, making people who deal with it disclose implementation details is a very small ask.
The analogy would be ever-so-slightly more accurate if you said "software is as much vital to the modern world as beverages".
It would also be more accurate if all water was free.
Neither of which is the case.
You must design your own hardware too, since you can't get the blueprints of commercial products.
I think commerce between individuals is a right.
Infringing on that should be justified in terms of protecting the rights of those involved, such as ensuring the quality of goods, enforcement of reasonable contract terms and such. We are involved in the process as participants in the market, and that’s the basis of any legitimacy we have to impose any rules in the market. That includes an obligation to fair treatment of other participants.
If someone writes notes, procedures, a diary, software etc for their own use they are under no obligation to publish it, ever. That’s basic privacy protection. Whether an executable was written from scratch in an assembler or is compiled from high level source code isn’t anyone else’s business. It should meet quality standards for commercial transactions and that’s it. There’s no more obligation to publish source than there is to publish design documents, early versions, or unpublished material. That would be an overreaching invasion of privacy.