ownership

Ownership is a mental construct. In fact ownership does not exist, save for the greed of any said human being. The fact that some humans think they can 'own' the dirt they live on, or the air-space above them, is ludicrous.

Why? Ownership stems from oppression. A world without ownership would exist just fine if people actually respected each other. I'm not condoning cult activities, rather the free access to information and the respect of society given to those who give the most in, rather than politicians and civil-service workers who only exist to perpetuate themselves.

It is fine to want to have, say.. a house of your own. But how fair is that as a human citizen when your brothers and sisters are living on the streets. While it may be that these people are not working, so don't deserve 'ownership' they are also not in a situation to give something positive back into the fold. The fact that human qualities such as comfort, happiness, and The satisfaction of living a useful existance, cannot be quantified, does not mean that 'ownership' is right and just because you can see the 'bottom line' in dollars.

Ownership of things such as intellectual property only propagates a system where there are haves and have nots. If you have an idea, firstly you should thank your environment for leading your mind to follow up such concepts.. since nothing you know is original. In the end, its all just an amalgamation of your life. Do you plan to pay back your parents for every dollar they spent raising you? Including the labour costs, and the time invested training you to think wisely? I think not, but you can give back freely, not only to help enhance others, but to enhance everything around you. People working together always achieve better, more efficient results than when working for their own greed.

I'd rather share my 8 crates of records, than have them stolen. at least i know who has them.. and how could i possibly enjoy every single record, every moment of every day? I keep them around as a convenience.. it is a serious luxury, from my experience, to have 'things'. People who have cars.. are living a luxurious existance.. even if it's a Dodge Omni. If someone really needed something, i'd give it to them, that's the kind of person i am. i go out of my way to share my ideas, my time (I do a lot of volunteer work), and spend precious intellectual property making people laugh FOR FREE.

I'd always rather be paid in support and people sharing their expertise, in trade for same. The only people we battle are ourselves (human race) with copyright and ownership issues.

The concept of ownership, in UNIX, is very similar to the same concept in real life -- the owner of a file has the power to decide who can access it, and to what extent. Most of the other powers conferred by ownership can be summarized to this one.

Two types of ownership exist in UNIX; each file has an owner, who is a user, as well as a group owner. Group ownership does not convey any special priveleges to the group in question; rather, it gives the owner of the file the ability to give or restrict that group's access to the file, independent of the rest of the system's users.

The owner of a file is set when the file is created; it can be changed by chown, but on many systems only the root user (the superuser) is permitted do this, because security holes are created by permitting users to give away their files to other users. (Obviously the reverse is not an issue; only the root and a file's owner can chown it.) The group owner of a file is set to the user's current group when the file is created; the user can change his/her current group with newgrp, to any group (s)he is a member of. It is also possible to change the group ownership of a file after it is created. This is done with the chgrp command, which can be used only by root and the owner of the file, not the members of the group. (The restriction on chown does not apply to chgrp.)

The permissions on the file, which can be changed with chmod, determine who has what degree of access. Read, write, and execute permission can be given to or taken from the owner, the group owner, or everyone else. Other bits store miscellaneous things such as setuid, setgid, and the sticky bit. Only the owner of the file (and root, of course) can change its permissions.

Own"er*ship, n.

The state of being an owner; the right to own; exclusive right of possession; legal or just claim or title; proprietorship.

 

© Webster 1913.