It's weird reading this thread on a site where I so often read "I don't believe in invisible property." Often applied to music, movies, or art.
I'm sure it's not as simple or hypocritical as the same people saying both things. And this specific story is about a very specific subversion of intellectual property rules to make it open. But it's a little weird hearing a complete lack of "information wants to be free" when the thing being "stolen" is our work.
I think the “information wants to be free” crowd would be happier if all work was free to be stolen. GPL enforcement is currently necessary to make that happen. It would be better if it wasn’t.
The original post is consistent with "information wants to be free" - we should be free to use and view Voice.ai source code, just as Voice.ai could use and view the code of these other projects they did. The only hypocrisy I see here is from Voice.ai, taking open source code themselves but then insisting (without any right to do so) that the result has become their proprietary "invisible property" and others can't do stuff with it.
I'm not sure. If software copyright didn't exist, then source code would still be treated as trade secret. Code obfuscation would be used to make reverse engineering harder and source code wouldn't be provided, which is not a lot of change for proprietary software. In addition, copyleft and free software attributions would not exist without a framework of enforcment. A clear loss for free software.
Free software, apart from some very permissive licenses, requires copyright to exist.
I'm sure it's not as simple or hypocritical as the same people saying both things. And this specific story is about a very specific subversion of intellectual property rules to make it open. But it's a little weird hearing a complete lack of "information wants to be free" when the thing being "stolen" is our work.