Getting Stalin--I mean Stallman--to play ball is going to require a bit of divine intervention. The man is a nutjob who is increasingly finding that there are a lot of people who want real freedom: the ability to mix and match products that work for them.

The one thing about OSS that y'all at the PFF and elsewhere don't seem to get is that a lot of it comes from the frustration that normal people have with buying software. They think they're buying it, when in fact they have no legal rights to the actual instructions... just the media they bought it on. My mom's reaction when she found out that she had to buy a new copy of Windows XP when her academic license ran out was, in part, a string of obscenities shouted out of a property rights-driven outrage. The summary, "it's my damn operating system. They sold it to me, they can give me my money back if they think they can tell me what to do with it."

Most people are like that. If you look at the OSS licenses, you'll notice that they don't even apply to anyone except developers and resellers. I have said it once, and I'll say it again. The public policy and business establishments are clueless about human nature these days and can't accept that the organic, human nature-based understanding of property rights is fundamentally different from the law school version. The only exception to the "first sale, it's mine" for most people is if you put a contract down in front of them and they sign it.

If you want to disarm people like Stallman, you need to accept the fact that property is property, and some of the things y'all call property is just a vernacularization of a legalistic way of saying "state-granted monopoly." Most people are fine with those monopolies, but only when they don't become assaults on the common definition of property rights. The ultimate test of whether or not the public can accept a "property rights" definition of copyright will be if copyright holders are willing to submit their creations to the restrictions and protections of state property laws.

I can give you the benefit of the doubt on things like reverse engineering, but the problem that ultimately arises is that the lobbyists for major copyright holders seek the maximum restrictions they can get on everyone else, including assaults on state-protected property rights. That is why I advocate a third way, which is to bind copyright holders to the social expectations of physical manufacturers. IE, you can sell a single copy of Windows, or agree to allow multiple versions to be installed from the same serial number, but you cannot legally force them to abide by the EULA or restrict their actions.