I am not trying to be difficult; but I do not understand what your point is? Yes, things happened prior to the social contract. That experience is the whole point of contracting out of the state of nature.
You misunderstood, but no worries. If you missed the reference I imagine many others did as well. "Nasty, brutish and short" is the Hobbes quote about the state of nature. Here is a little teaser from WP:
Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature" human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape, and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against all" (bellum omnium contra omnes). To avoid this, free men contract with each other to establish political community i.e. civil society through a social contract in which they all gain security in return for subjecting themselves to an absolute Sovereign, preferably (for Hobbes) a monarch. [1]
Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau's social contract is similar to mpyne's "Sometimes long-term freedom does require constraint on permissible action."[2]
Sometimes I like to think of it as the problem with local minima/maxima preventing an optimization algorithm from achieving the global minima/maxima, except applied at large.
Put in the context of computer software licenses, one should simply imagine a world where all software were BSD-licensed and then see if open-source as we know it could feasibly continue. Certainly it would in some areas, but eventually if a given open-source project were consistently out-competing a proprietary product, the business being disadvantaged could fork the whole thing at once and turbocharge its now-proprietary development for long enough to supplant the old, open version.
Witness what Nokia did with Qt. They poured tons of money into it and turned it in a short time into a mobile-class toolkit that was even more the "Best of Breed". They had so much resource investment that they were able to relicense the whole thing from GPL/QPL to LGPL/QPL. That particular case has turned out alright, but it should be illustrative of the danger of a world with a weak F/OSS ecosystem.
Given all the problems we still have with software patents and other IP shenanigans I simply can't rest on the idea that the mere technical superiority of development "in the open" must necessarily and inevitably lead to a world where software is open and available to the users who would need it, without the judicious use of copyleft licenses in the mix along with BSD/MIT-style licenses. They both have their place.
I can't see any sane reason how anyone can possible miss the connection. GPL provides a social contract that say: If you give away software and tell people that they are free to distribute copies, you can't come back a few days later and sue all their friends for patent infringement. You told him that he could give copies freely to his friend, and by suing, you are stabbing him in the back. This is behavior, even if it might infringe on developers "unlimited natural freedoms" of stabbing people in the back.
