131–140 of 229 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Such a poison pill could be considered a feature insofar as it discourages consolidation of companies.
Big companies can implement economies of scale. This is what makes the country wealthy.
For example, automobiles cannot be made by artisans for anyone but the wealthy.
Suppose your libpopular forbids ill-faith actors from using it. Also suppose that I wrote a my-utility, a neutral tool, that depends on libpopular. If some bad actor uses my-utility for wrongdoing, will I be responsible for their behavior? Will my-utility be in breach of your license?
Take a look at the original json.org license and all the problems that the "not for evil" clause they added to it had caused. Ultimately though, if you put a non free license on your libraries, somebody will cry foul, fork it, and evil will still happen.
(W3C standards, for example, require "multiple independent implementations to proceed along a standardisation path". https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ )
I think of the case of the Russian programmer who was arrested and jailed for stealing proprietary code from Goldman Sachs. During the trial it was revealed that Goldman Sachs would use open source software and replace the software licence with their own:
"Open source was an idea that depended on collaboration and sharing, and Serge had a long history of contributing to it. He didn’t fully understand how Goldman could think it was O.K. to benefit so greatly from the work of others and then behave so selfishly toward them. “You don’t create intellectual property,” he said. “You create a program that does something.” But from then on, on instructions from Schlesinger, he treated everything on Goldman Sachs’s servers, even if it had just been transferred there from open source, as Goldman Sachs’s property. (At Serge’s trial Kevin Marino, his lawyer, flashed two pages of computer code: the original, with its open-source license on top, and a replica, with the open-source license stripped off and replaced by the Goldman Sachs license.)"
From: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma...
For this author's definition of "bad guys" (megacorps), AGPL is probably the easiest poison pill. As with all poison pills, this will also make many (most?) "good" users unable to use it.
This project is no curl or database engine, it seems to be a slightly easier way to set HTTP response headers. I bet most of the uses are transitive (someone using something that uses something that uses a framework that uses something that uses this project).
In particular, this project is something small enough that nobody will pay for it, not because it's not worth it, but because the friction of paying for it is higher than rewriting it from scratch. And "the bad guys" are unlikely to use it directly in their major products due to the pure nature of it.
In most cases, but especially this one IMO, you just get to choose wheter to contribute to the commons, the actual commons, for everyone, including "the bad guys" - or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is impossible to write a real "use for good, not evil" [1] license, because there's no formal, universally accepted notions of good and evil. While there are things that are universally considered good, or considered evil, the areas around them are large, nebulous, and are anything but clearly outlined. Hence legally avoiding the "anti-evil" license terms will always be a relatively easy option for a willing party…
I have this thinking that, in reality, there's no such thing as objectively 'good' or objectively 'bad' It's all context and timing. Almost everyone that will attack this idea will present actions that are loaded with context - murder, is killing when it's bad, self defence is killing when it's good. If you look at everything, and look at it's non-contextual action, then you can easily find contextually 'good' and co…
What I am hearing is if you remove context (and timing, lets say it is part of context) then there is no good or bad. But who said to remove context? Arent we saying then there is good and bad depending on context?
Many people, including myself, would agree in the abstract, while at the same time some situations being very clear once down to a real example.
It reminds me of people claiming pain is an illusion or facts not existing (very edgy), until someone slaps them in the face to prove "I did slap you, that is a fact". I think that is reality, and specific examples are easier.
P.S. I would add values into the context.