Open Source Mythology(lgug2z.com) |
Open Source Mythology(lgug2z.com) |
The venn diagram for "people who give a shit about FOSS licences" and "people who daily drive Windows" is nearly two circles.
I suspect there is a lot more overlap if you instead consider “people who give a shit about FOSS licences” in relation to “people who know what a tiling window manager is and want to use one, and daily drive Windows”.
Installing third party software is much easier on Windows.
Komorebi's readme says "Anyone is free to make their own fork of komorebi with changes intended either for personal use or for integration back upstream via pull requests."
These texts seem to contradict each other, especially as there's no way to make a fork on GitHub without also distributing the software.
If I put on my "totally-uncharitable" hat, it seems this author, and the author of the "PolyForm Strict License" on which it was based, are stupid, self-righteous and don't understand the basics of copyright licensing.
As an illustration: the author uses a Mao Zedong quotation as one of his points.
on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.
i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.
I don't know how enforceable that becomes, and I know that people the author refers to as dogmatists may be quick to point out the flaws (on some level it reminds me of pharmacists who refuse to dispense medications on personal grounds - eg, contraceptives or diabetic supplies to people they suspect of drug use).
But I think the conversation is valuable - there is a moral/ethical dilemma for many of us who truly love computing, when faced with a job market that consists largely of For-Profit Corporations And Governments Doing Bad Things (obviously this is personal and relative).
he said "apt" nyuck nyuck
Is it just that the license doesn't allow use by corporations, and that's why they say the target audience is:
> Those who reject genocide-friendly software licensing
Can someone help me grok it a little better?
It takes some assumptions to make sense of the "firewall" part. I'm strawsteelmanning here:
- There are Bad People
- If Bad People successfully use my software, it will lead to Bad Things
- The Good Things caused by permissive licenses are more than offset by (or can't compensate for) by the harm done by BP
- My software enables the harm and it wouldn't happen to the same extent without it
- The only way to mitigate this is to retain authority to decide exactly who gets to do what with the source
- Under an Open Source license I am unable to refuse Bad People from using or resharing my software
It follows that any software with enough adoption available under a free license will lead to Bad Things. Therefore the only ethical license is one where the author retains this absolute discretion/power to tell BP "no". This discretion is the "firewall". The inability of the author to arbitrarily forbid users from adopting the software is the "lost right to refusal of the individual" mentioned.
When taken just a bit further it's not too dissimilar to resigning to the reality that we must outlaw strong cryptography and restrict access to general computing and "powerful AI" to only identifiable and accountable non-BP because criminals and terrorists means we can't have nice things and slavery is freedom.
Don't let the fancy quotes and rhetoric give you the illusion that there're any deep insights behind this. Tankies gotta tank.
I do not find it compelling and will continue to promote free software.
That is, they are against free and indiscriminate sharing, which would allow bad people to use their software.
They link directly to this Q&A in the OSI FAQ:
> Can I stop “evil people” from using my program?
> No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.
Making the claim that OSI necessitates "genocide-friendly licenses" is not a constructive direction.
OP could conceivably have come up with an alternative license preserving the freedoms without allowing the uses they disagree with. They chose the easier path, which is by itself fine. Painting the entire FLOSS community as genocide enablers and claiming there is no middle ground as long as the author is not in complete control of all redistribution and derivatives ("right to refuse") is unnecessary.
The problem is, of course, in the lack of an established, clear-cut, whole-society consensus on what is good and what is evil, and also in the inability of humans to formally define even their own criteria for that. As with porn, "I can recognize it when I see it" is a bit shaky ground for legal matters.
Speaking of the For-Profit Corporations, the profit is what pays the wages of those they employ, so, unless you agree to do programming (or any professional activity) entirely as a pastime,..
It seems difficult to do for general-purpose software.