I liked the article. It sung to my heart. I’ve been in this world for a while. Lived through the failure and hyperacalars just taking without giving back.
I don’t know what to think. But I’m not happy with where we are and it’s nice to hear someone else talking about it.
The consequences of what that article proposes is we’re gonna be back to this period of history where companies were all using proprietary technology that self-taught devs won’t ever learn and that students will only learn if they can afford a school that can use it, in addition to poor developer experience because of maintainer agenda being driven by money rather than community requests.
@KaKi87@simonlm Yeah, I’m not really a fan. I do think we need to be withholding labor and organizing, but the idea that free software (and the internet in general) can make up for poor governance and fascism was never a reality. We’re creating tools, and the fascists and corporations will use them whether the license allows it or not. For creative commons, NC works because it’s obvious when an image or text has been co-opted by a company. But for code, if all you have is a binary or website…
@KaKi87@simonlm I’m extremely sympathetic to the author’s frustration at having their GPL’d software used by literal nazis, but I don’t see how making it non-commercial fixes that. Instead, you specifically design software to be anti-fascist. Deep in the code, if you’re not checking for specific slurs and throwing errors (as a simplistic example), then it will be used by people who use those slurs.
@KaKi87@simonlm A linked post (https://writing.kemitchell.com/living/Ethical-Licenses-Talking-Points) shows part of the problem; the assumption is that a non-permissive license will hinder adoption by the nazis (and/or corps), but everyone else will be just fine. That’s just not true; Debian, as an example, will not be able to distribute it. Meanwhile, corps have tons of money; they will just create their own fascistic software (see: Google’s rewriting of the world).
The root of the problem is governance and money corrupting everything.
I’m all for ethical licensing, and defensive licensing, but we’ll likely end up with an unmanageable soup of various licenses that everyone is nervous about misinterpreting. We lose efficacy and everyone will just default back to the same handful of licenses we’re currently using.
I think unless it was a small number of crystal clear alternative licenses with broadly agreeable terms, we’d get chaos, followed by complacency.
I read this blog post yesterday and it was insightful.
Seems like we could solve multiple problems in one go here…
I liked the article. It sung to my heart. I’ve been in this world for a while. Lived through the failure and hyperacalars just taking without giving back.
I don’t know what to think. But I’m not happy with where we are and it’s nice to hear someone else talking about it.
The consequences of what that article proposes is we’re gonna be back to this period of history where companies were all using proprietary technology that self-taught devs won’t ever learn and that students will only learn if they can afford a school that can use it, in addition to poor developer experience because of maintainer agenda being driven by money rather than community requests.
@KaKi87 @simonlm Yeah, I’m not really a fan. I do think we need to be withholding labor and organizing, but the idea that free software (and the internet in general) can make up for poor governance and fascism was never a reality. We’re creating tools, and the fascists and corporations will use them whether the license allows it or not. For creative commons, NC works because it’s obvious when an image or text has been co-opted by a company. But for code, if all you have is a binary or website…
@KaKi87 @simonlm I’m extremely sympathetic to the author’s frustration at having their GPL’d software used by literal nazis, but I don’t see how making it non-commercial fixes that. Instead, you specifically design software to be anti-fascist. Deep in the code, if you’re not checking for specific slurs and throwing errors (as a simplistic example), then it will be used by people who use those slurs.
@KaKi87 @simonlm A linked post (https://writing.kemitchell.com/living/Ethical-Licenses-Talking-Points) shows part of the problem; the assumption is that a non-permissive license will hinder adoption by the nazis (and/or corps), but everyone else will be just fine. That’s just not true; Debian, as an example, will not be able to distribute it. Meanwhile, corps have tons of money; they will just create their own fascistic software (see: Google’s rewriting of the world).
The root of the problem is governance and money corrupting everything.
I’m all for ethical licensing, and defensive licensing, but we’ll likely end up with an unmanageable soup of various licenses that everyone is nervous about misinterpreting. We lose efficacy and everyone will just default back to the same handful of licenses we’re currently using.
I think unless it was a small number of crystal clear alternative licenses with broadly agreeable terms, we’d get chaos, followed by complacency.
More likely, people’s work will get thrown into the bin because its poorly licensed.
Well that’s kind of what I’m getting at. How many times does that happen before everybody just goes back to using GPL, MIT, etc…
Fuuuuck that!