Doesn't Affero GPL cover this?
Do we need to rethink what free software is?
51–60 of 153 posts
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Be careful of what you ask for. IP laws are the foundation of what makes the GPL enforceable.
From the perspective of a developer using the BSD license, such as myself, this isn't such a big deal. A violation means "someone removed or replaced the copyright notice in my source code file". I don't want them to stop using or redistributing the program, including in its binary form that has no copyright notices; just restore the notices in any redistributed source. I'm in favor of retaining only a limited form o…
Which is why I used GPL as the example -- it requires modifications to be shared. BSD really wouldn't be affected nearly as much.
If we lived in a world where all free software was more like BSD, projects would look a lot less like linux, and a lot more like this:
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure about that. Of course enforcing your usage ideas will be next to impossible, but mentioning sth. can serve other purposes too (e.g. making a set of shared values visible to other developers). So if you for example say that everybody except military, secret services and weapons manufacturers are allowed to use your software, that might not stop them from using it, but it makes other devs consider similar…
Anyone can add ethical stipulations to the license of their choice but the result is no longer a free software license. A license requiring a user to adhere to the software developers' moral code is the opposite of a free software license. In your example regarding "weapons manufacturers;" in the United States the right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution and interpreted by the courts as an inalien…
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Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. I think the strength of free software is that it's making a single ethical point (which is hard enough to get across.) I support anybody wanting to make "ethical" software, but it's 1) not the same thing as free software and 2) very difficult to make an ethical tool; people find it hard enough to explain their personal ethical distinctions, I definitely don't want to listen to a some hammer's idiosyncratic bel…
Say you develope a targeting algorithm to be used by a robotic arm with a water pistol — wouldn’t it then be totally legitimate to say: you are allowed to use this freely, as long as you don’t use it with a real gun? The non commercial clause in the creative commons is also sth like this: free for non-commercial usage, all others have to ask. I don’t see why authors shouldn’t be allowed to excert at least a little bi…
> The non commercial clause in the creative commons is also sth like this: free for non-commercial usage, all others have to ask.
Perfectly fine. But then it's not free software, or in this case free creative work. It's as you said: it's free only for some which makes it unfree in general.
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#55Whether software is used for ethical or unethical purposes has nothing to do with the license. There is no possible way to bake subjective ethical usage guidelines into a license and still end up with free software. Trying to license "good" and "evil" boils down to the same slippery slope that the TOR Project dealt with when they had to reject requests to add censorship mechanisms. "Can't we just censor hate speech?"…
I couldn't have written it better myself.
On a related note, the person behind the Hippocratic License (HL) which they define as "a modified MIT license that specifically prohibits the use of open source software to harm others" was recently asked by OSI [1] to modify the language in the original document since it might've led people to wrongly believe that the aforementioned license was Open Source Software and that software distributed under it was Open Source Software.
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#56Any sort of 'ethical' clause will open you to endless legal battles, and make such software effectively impossible to use for anyone but large corporations able to afford those battles, or to buy themselves custom licenses. I.e. it will even further concentrate power, and accomplish the exact opposite of what free software set out to do. Not to mention the ethical nature of the software could be interpreted by potent…
Never understood why buying special licenses is an issue.
In general, it's not. Only when the license is such that using the software is impossible, even when the use is entirely in line with free software principles. You're effectively writing non-free software, but masquerading as free, and stealing its oxygen.
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#57I'm the author of some popular open source software, but I don't have any illusions about the relative ease of building my software. This author sounds like they are trying throw their weight around, but I'm not sure they realize how much software is easily reproducible, given the right incentives, with nothing more than a spec. Open source is a convenience, and that's why people use it. Pretending that you can have serious influence over what companies are allowed to do with your software, outside of a very narrow and legally well-defined area, is seriously misguided.
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#58I think this is a slippery path.
Freedom 0 says: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
If free software moves away from this how do we handle the curation of acceptable and not acceptable uses? This is a can of worms I 'd rather be left unopened.
I agree that there is a problem about monetization of software and I welcome the discussion about it. Abolishing freedom 0 however is something I 'd be very hesitant.
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#59The JSON license includes a requirement that "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" Thanks, I never knew this and needed a chuckle this morning.
Is it a joke or do they really not realize that there are no universal moral truths and that "good" and "evil" are completely subjective? What are the legal implications of that statement in theory and practice?
Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't quite agree, the GPL is after all a licence founded on a set of ethics.
The GPL is based around a well-defined set of ethics that centers around giving the user complete freedom to use and modify the software. This is necessary for software to be considered free. It's certainly possible to restrict usage based around a moral code. Look at the JSON License: https://www.json.org/license.html > The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil. So, yes, it would be possible to restrict software…
>The GPL is based around a well-defined set of ethics that centers around giving the user complete freedom to use and modify the software
I take issue with this. First of all, this “well-defined” qualifier is ironically poorly defined. What does that mean? It either is or is not derived from some principle or set of principles; it is ultimately an example of ethics being imposed as a restriction.
Secondly, you don’t actually have “complete freedom”. A recent example I encountered was the utility github.com/gojp/goreportcard which still relies on github.com/alecthomas/gometalinter despite gometalinter being deprecated in favor of the much faster github.com/golangci/golangci-lint. Because golangci-lint is licensed under GPL and goreportcard is licensed under Apache 2.0 it would violate GPL to integrate golangci-lint into goreportcard. So either goreportcard has to adopt a new license and ensure they’re compliant with that license or suffer relying on subpar software that has been abandoned by its creator and community.
Now perhaps I’m ignorant (something I often find myself guilty of when speaking on such lofty topics, please forgive and correct me if this is the case) to what you mean by “complete freedom” but that doesn’t seem like “complete freedom” to me, it sounds like two incompatible sets of ethics.