I actually do read the terms and conditions on software packages, but as an average intelligent person do I understand the implications of it all? Worse still they seem to be getting worse over time. Do they protect real people or an entity that doesn’t really exist?
Why on earth do we allow this complexity to increase?
It can only get worse. We are tying millions of people into legal terms that they do not understand for the sake of WHO?
Why do we unnecessarily restrict each other in our abilities to do anything? Who are we really protecting, the author, the team that created it or an identity that owns with only apparently a motive for profit.
Do the creators of the software benefit from this?
Are the shareholders of the product the people who worked hard on creating, developing and improving it?
Often the ideas and work you put into a project is not your own property, even if it is outside of the workplace. If you work in these fields think who benefits from all the work and ideas that you have? Is it humanity, is it your team, is it you? The power of any idea is if it is shared and allowed to grow on its own. As an originator of an idea do you think you should be credited and allowed to share it, allow it to grow? Who is credited – a person? Or is credit to an entity that doesn’t really exist?
Protected by ever increasing terms that real entities are struggling to understand, or often now ignore, protecting an entity that has been created for one purpose only, profit to its shareholders.
In my humble opinion the whole world would progress much faster and in a much more social and collaborative way if we just forget about companies as identities and make one legal entity stand out above all else. The legal entity of EVERYONE, of every living being who has the capacity to understand that it exists.
The biggest and most wonderful event, again my opinion that occurred in the information technology field was the creation of the idea of Open Source. Look at what has been achieved by those that had nothing to gain from it but the combined use of the application that they were working on. Now imagine that no software, or its intellectual property, was owned by anyone, but existed as a source for anyone that wished to use or expand on any of it.