Chapter 3. Software
You probably think you already know what software is. It's that CD a friend gives you with the latest game to run on your computer. Were life only so simple (and copyright laws so liberal) that you could live happily ever after with such beliefs.
Life, alas, is not so simple, and neither is software. The disc isn't software. Software is nothing you can hold in your hand. Rather, it's the hardware that stores the software. The real software is made from the same stuff as dreams, as evanescent as an inspiration, as elusive as the meaning of the current copyright laws. Software is nothing but a set of ideas, ideas that (one hopes) express a way to do something. Those ideas are written in a code the same way our words and sentences ...
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