2008-09-01 00:00:03
By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects. What would things in the free software world look like if the courts had decided otherwise? For one thing, the implementation of copyleft would have to be completely different. Hypothetical? Academic? Not if you’re a hardware developer! Because this is exactly what the law does look like for designs for physical hardware (where the product is not protected by copyright). 

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