291–300 of 551 posts
One of Trump's biggest advantages is his enemies drastically over-react to things and end up looking stupid. GPL violations are a serious business and Mastodon is well within their rights to ask for the code to be released. But the business hasn't even opened yet and they're already waving permanent revocation around. This sort of aggression in enforcing the GPL may actually be unprecedented.
Does a history of enforcement help in cases like this? The article itself says that Truth Social is "antithetical" to Mastodon's values, but that there's nothing they can do about the usage of their software other than license violations. It sounds like they have a bias to enforce their license in this case. If Mastodon has a weak history of enforcing their license to other organizations, does it weaken the case? I'm…
That's why I call people like him "termites of civilization". They slowly eat at the foundation, until the society itself collapses. We are already seeing it. The pandemic of selfishness and shamelessness, and overwhelming rudeness toward each other. Just look at what the service industry has to put up with - and it all came directly from the top. Donald Trump let everyone know that the rules are NOT for them, that it is totally OK to be a shit-tier human.
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But for all that superficial posturing, he accomplished very little of his agenda and generally ended up trying to play ball anyway. The anti-establishment game lasted until he entered the white House. His primary accomplishment was building a base of angry people.
He salted the Supreme Court. He also destroyed US credibility. His entire term was a wake up: we have all tied ourselves to a ship that is not unsinkable.
That's what his supporters thought/hoped but I'd say that didn't really pan out the way they thought, either.
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If all software was licensed that way, 5-15 years would pass then suddenly there'd be a whole bunch of "Wow, Stallman was right again! We should have been using free software licenses!" style articles. Restricting software use to only people approved by the creators is a terrible idea. Society has to operate with some level of trust that even people we disagree with, using methods we don't approve of, have the potent…
Is it really a terrible idea to restrict your software from being used to control weaponry? To spread lies about science, like climate change denial or vaccine lies? To host child pornography sharing? These above scenarios amount to handing criminals and bad actors powerful technological tools which allow them to increase harms done to society. This is a software company's choice, there is no law that states a compan…
I imagine an autonomous sentry-turret (Half-Life, Portal, etc) comes to mind. Obviously that’s right-out.
But what about airsoft or paintball? Those are recreational activities, but in some jurisdictions their respective “guns” can be legally considered weapons because they can still do serious bodily harm - as well as intimidate.
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Another example is “Windows for Warships”: you could build this software for that, no? So, is a warship a weapon? Naval frigate? Merchant marine vessel that carries small-arms for self-defense? At what point does arbitrary hardware attached to the computer running this software become a “weapon” or not?
I’m not a rights-absolutist - I just think when writing a license with restrictions that are going to be open to interpretation get a gosh-darned lawyer involved and be as specific as possible, and then some. You don’t want a project getting bogged-down by internet nerds complaining about stuff like this. Not least an army of trolls who will spam your inbox with hair-splitting questions about the classification of firearms technology to gleefully waste your time. (“it’s not an ‘assault rifle’, it’s a ‘scary looking semi-automatic AR-15’”, “bump-stocks aren’t automatics lololol”, etc)
> As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour And sensible people would prefer that license violations would be published and pursued fairly, and personal feelings kept personal, rather than creating a soft list of people and perspectives whose online/computing freedom is less important than others.
But isn't it exactly what they say? Like "hey, I wish they didn't use Mastodon, but there's a license and they can use our software if they want to and they comply with the license"? Or did I misunderstand this? Their only issue in the article is that they don't comply with the license. I believe the "personal feelings" paragraph was added so that they explain to some people that they don't want to/cannot prevent the…
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Yeah I remember all those lectures about over reaction and we ended up with an insurrection and an entire half of our country convinced an election was stolen.
[snark]Almost lost the Republic on Jan 6th to a whole lot of shoving.[/snark] But more seriously it looks like the government is having a hell of a time convicting anyone there of more than mischief and trespassing.
Snark aside, the danger of Jan 6 was not shoving - It was people deciding to do the wrong thing in the name of gaining power.
The insurrectionists who organized January 6 (yes it was planned) were at the Willard Hotel in a number of suites they called a "War Room" (yes, their words). The entire plan was to delay certification of Joe Biden's victory to give state legislatures time to arrange an alternate slate of electors to be sent to the Capitol. This delay was achieved via a violent mob directed at the Capitol. A delay happened by it wasn't long enough, so the effort failed.
But it almost succeeded. They wanted to push Pence in the direction of refusing to certify Biden's 2020 win, thereby kicking the decision to state delegates, of which Republicans controlled a majority. Obviously they would have voted for Trump over Biden.
This is how autocracy happens in America: a president who loses both the popular vote and electoral college, appointed by a political party on the basis of fraudulent claims of fraud. No elections will be trusted by either side after that happens.
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What a surprise that those people happen to be neocons. Somehow we're supposed to believe George W. Bush is a good guy after all.
I'm confused, what do GWB or neocons have to do with a willingness to lie about elections? Are you saying those two are bad because they aren't willing to lie about it?
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In general, you don't have any obligation to enforce your rights. There is the well-known exception of trademark law, but that's in the nature of the matter. If PepsiCo sells Coca-Cola and the Coca-Cola company doesn't react, then the trade mark obviously doesn't allow customers to identify genuine Coca-Cola.
You don't have an obligation and in theory (and only in theory) it doesn't matter but a history of doing it anyway sure as shit helps in court.
Now, start a website selling Doctor Who episodes, and see how far your incomplete enforcement argument gets you with the court.
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>In what world does using software to marginalize people or mislead the public create a better world? The road to hell ... something something ... good intentions. Who defines what 'marginalization of people' means (a strange term if you really think about it), and why would you think they would get that definition right?
> Who defines what 'marginalization of people' means The software creators, which seems very reasonable to me. This isn't some arbitrary judge deeming what is marginalizing or not. This is the creators of the software saying "We don't want to build something that complete dickweeds can use for evil." Don't like their definition of "dickweeds" or "evil"? Fine, build your own shit then.
> The software creators
I don't understand how that could work. Would "marginalizing people" have any concrete legal definition at all or would it literally be anything the creator decides now or in the future?
Software creator says I'm marginalizing people, I deny it and refuse to stop using their library. How would a court sort that out?
Mastodon has also banned Gab and others from the network that they disagree with. The whole point of a federated system is free speech... yet they have spent a lot of time trying to kick out people who disagree with them. Frankly, it’s disheartening I want to know what the communists, fascists, republicans, democrats, racists, religious, technocrats, etc want to say. It’s so frustrating having everyone in bubbles and…