You are right, I drew a wider conclusion then you were making. […] I was drawing a similar philisophical point, and apologize for conflating it with yours.

I think I agree in principal with what I believe your point is (that open hardware and protocols are equally as important as open software). I apologize if it sounded like I disagreed. However, sadly I don’t know of any significant movement/organization pushing for open hardware, and my point was that for the software side of things there already is a major community and ecosystem for that.

I know mike has argued for a broader philisophical platform than the focus on software, and I think he has effectively argued for the libre software solution even if he doesn’t say the words because he is focused on broader approaches than just fix software. I’ve gotten the impression that he doesn’t like software being under either copyright or patent.

I think it would be interesting to see what Mike exact thoughts on that are. You mention software not being covered by copyright or patent. I think the libre/free software movement has actually show a flaw in that (when taken at face value).
In fact I would argue that copyleft copyright licenses are a greater public good/service that if the work was never covered by copyright. The reason for this is that copyleft ensure that people who get the work, and entitled to the ability to recreate it/modify it/create new works from it, thus in line with the constitutional purpose of copyright. In the case of no copyright, there would be no obligation to share the source, which means even though works would be "public domain", in reality they would not because there would be less or even no incentive to release the source code (so people modifying the work would have to reverse engineer it, which can be a real hindrance to creating derived works).

All of that said, I would like to put a thought I had here about changes to copyright (for software only, and some of this logic doesn’t apply quite the same for non-software).
I would propose that proprietary software copyright be very much limited, say to five years. I would also argue that this is not the terror some copyright maximalists would have us believe. Largely because in five years time bugs and security vulnerabilities will be found and patched in that software. Of course that patched/updated version would be new, derived works, and their copyright term would expire after the initial works copyright.

For other works I would say that length of copyright for the software should be somewhat proportional to the nature of the copyleft license. This, of course because software people copyleft helps ensure more people are able to create and share more works (again being fully inline with constitutional foundation for the power to create copyright laws). However I would say the length should still max out at something small, maybe 14 years.

And really, Coming to the comments and saying "hey, you know, if these vendors used libre software it wouldn’t matter!" its the most no shit sherlock kind of answer.

If I understand your argument here, it is that the greater portion of Techdirts audience is already familiar with libre software.

You aren’t going into either the nature or the ideology. So its a weird hill to die on that nobody is talking about it, since you really aren’t either.

My perception of libre software, in the context of Techdirt, is kind of the elephant in the room. I frequently think of it while reading Techdirt, but I rarely see people mention it. In light of the previous addressed comment, I guess I never got the impression most of the community was familiar with the subject, and it that case yeah it was a very stupid thing for me to even mention.