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Do we need to rethink what free software is?

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121–130 of 153 posts

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#121
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FSF has never viewed anyone who wants exceptions to copyleft as being part of their community to begin with. Even something simple like the JSON license is something that the FSF sees as fundamentally incompatible with their values. https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/License:JSON

Yep, and I remember Stallman saying that these exceptions are not desirable in a talk. Matthew Garrett certainly knows it and certainly wants that something is done on the matter. Which could be good. However, the title implies a possible evolution of the definition of free software, but I just can't see that as conceivable. That would be akin to change the definition of the prime numbers to exclude 1, breaking many…

> That would be akin to change the definition of the prime numbers to exclude 1

But one isn't prime: https://primes.utm.edu/notes/faq/one.html

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#122
post #109

The agenda is made very clear toward the end of the article: > As stewards of the free software definition, the Free Software Foundation should be taking the lead in ensuring that these issues are discussed. The priority of the board right now should be to restructure itself to ensure that it can legitimately claim to represent the community and play the leadership role it's been failing to in recent years, otherwise…

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Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#123
post #88
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the term "intellectual property" is like when someone pisses on you and calls it "rain". It makes no sense. The idea if I was on an island and can't share freely share some ideas of yours that you hold the "copyright" has zero correlation with any notion of property, and is much better described as slavery -- a form of control over my behavior. > especially while there are people suffering actual physical sla…

I'm out. Hit me up when 'slavery' just doesn't deliver the punch you're after and you move on to intellectual genocide. We're basically in the verbal equivalent of the audio loudness wars. There's no dynamic range left in our speech, everything is theft, hate, rape, violence, racism, fascism and of course slavery on some ever increasing but poorly articulated spectrum.

I'm using logic. Intellectual Slavery is a logical term that corresponds much more closely to the rest of our language than IP.

"A slave is a person owned by someone and slavery is the state of being under the control of someone where a person is forced to work for another"

I think "Intellectual Monopoly" is a good term too, if the term "Slavery" makes you queasy. I think they are both 10x-100x more accurate than the current "IP" lies.

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I'm in favor of retaining only a limited form of IP law, which makes it unlawful to misrepresent the origin of a work. There's a technical solution (crypto signing) to that which is applicable exactly to those people who care, so it seems unnecessary to have legal machinery to enforce it.

I think this is a very good point. With git and proof of work hash patterns, it becomes not only unwise to falsely try and take credit for someone else's work, but technically infeasible to do. It's also becomes quite easy to add references (did I forget something? -- send a pull request!).

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#125
post #107
post #4

The solution here is simple: abandon intellectual slavery laws. They don’t do anyone any good except the 1%. Look at the richest amongst us, a sizable majority are rich because of IS laws. Forcing poor people the world over to pay artificially high prices for intellectual goods, by threat of force, is a form of slavery, poor and simple. Anyone who says they will stop making new ideas if they don’t get artificially in…

What are you talking about? This sounds like a Lyndon LaRouche screed. Can you say this in, like, normal English without ideologically biased adjectives? And maybe even throw in an example to clarify?

Intellectual Slavery laws of Copyrights and Patents do not in practice "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Instead they serve to transfer wealth from the majority of people to the 1%. Almost all profits from such laws flow to the richest corporations and individuals.

In places where such Intellectual Slavery laws have been flouted, such as China in the past few decades, you've seen great progress. If IS laws were followed in China, you'd have a richer Bill Gates and a lot more poor Chinese.

In the United States, in states that produce fewer information products, you see much lower standards of wealth, education, and health, as a substantial percentage of income flows from these states to IS states in return for overpriced information goods such as textbooks, software, medicine, and entertainment.

If people instead were free to use their own equipment to copy and share intellectual goods, such unnatural flows of wealth would not occur, and you would see a drastic lowering of wealth inequality, an improvement in education, a reduction in healthcare costs, an increase in higher quality educational content, and more.

The progress of science and useful arts would be accelerated, as billions of people would have access to the same information that currently only the wealth 1% have access to.

Perhaps there might be a few inventors/scientists/authors/musicians/etc who might decide without monopoly profits they won't invent, but even if there were, the impact from their abstaining from the field would not even be noticed, as there would be a flourishing of inventors/creators/etc who would thrive in the absence of restrictions on what they can do with ideas.

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#126

This discussion about enforcing specific ethical standards in software licences is nothing new, freeware licences that forbade specific usage (like in military) existed quarter century ago. That is why freedom 0 (the freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose) in free software definition is important, and rejection of enforcement of specific ethical standard was intention and not omission. This reflects…

Indeed. As I put it on Reddit the other day:

> Maybe you think that allowing people with a broad spectrum of opinions to work together on open source was only necessary in the early days when the movement was small and obscure, and now that it's popular and successful, those on the Right Side of History are justified in closing ranks and purging all who disagree because it's Their Movement. But I would say: why do you think the movement was successful in the first place? If you kill the common ground between hackers of all stripes, you're slaying the golden goose. The movement will not only resume languishing in obscurity, it will collapse in a series of petty squabbles over who has the correct exegesis of bell hooks's Ain't I A Woman with respect to routing underprivileged TCP/IP packets and who is obviously wrong and a cryptofascist and must therefore be expelled. Because that's where the movement will end up, once the current contingent of people pressing for power in FOSS get their way. (There is another theory which states that this has already happened; RMS is no right winger after all.)

> And that will be music to the ears of upper management of Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. They will then drop their façade of loving open source. The peace floats will stop dead in their tracks and the tanks will roll out.

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#127
post #125
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? This sounds like a Lyndon LaRouche screed. Can you say this in, like, normal English without ideologically biased adjectives? And maybe even throw in an example to clarify?

Intellectual Slavery laws of Copyrights and Patents do not in practice "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Instead they serve to transfer wealth from the majority of people to the 1%. Almost all profits from such laws flow to the richest corporations and individuals. In places where such Intellectual Slavery laws have been flouted, such as China in the past few decades, you've seen great progress. If I…

Thank you for that.

While I believe that you are conflating a few corrupt corporatist systems, that (I believe) will not be broken up by freeing up IP; I understand your point much better now. Again - thank you.

EDIT: I updated a grammar and a punctuation. Probably neither to perfection.

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that copyright licenses can't add restrictions? Patent retaliation clauses in software copyright licenses suggest otherwise to me.

This isn't a restriction. Rather, a license grants a patent license which has its additional requirements. If you violate those requirements, you lose a patent license, but you don't violate the copyright (at which point, the license can be read as if it didn't have patent clause at all).

Can't copyright licenses terminate for any licensee who violates any term? What about copyleft itself? Don't violators lose their licenses?

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#129
post #127
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intellectual Slavery laws of Copyrights and Patents do not in practice "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Instead they serve to transfer wealth from the majority of people to the 1%. Almost all profits from such laws flow to the richest corporations and individuals. In places where such Intellectual Slavery laws have been flouted, such as China in the past few decades, you've seen great progress. If I…

Thank you for that. While I believe that you are conflating a few corrupt corporatist systems, that (I believe) will not be broken up by freeing up IP; I understand your point much better now. Again - thank you. EDIT: I updated a grammar and a punctuation. Probably neither to perfection.

Sorry this is an emotional topic for me, as sometimes I get flashbacks to when I was a poor 19 year old kid on Napster just wanting to listen to the music all the rich kids were listening to, and then got sued by the RIAA.

Re: Do we need to rethink what free software is?

#130
post #129
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for that. While I believe that you are conflating a few corrupt corporatist systems, that (I believe) will not be broken up by freeing up IP; I understand your point much better now. Again - thank you. EDIT: I updated a grammar and a punctuation. Probably neither to perfection.

Sorry this is an emotional topic for me, as sometimes I get flashbacks to when I was a poor 19 year old kid on Napster just wanting to listen to the music all the rich kids were listening to, and then got sued by the RIAA.

That makes sense. I get triggered by certain things as well (but as I age, less and less, I think?).

I do appreciate the extended explanation. Your top-level comment was just not computing for me.

I am curious about whether wealth inequality is a top-tier (first-order) problem, as opposed to being a consequence of maybe other problems - and I may reach out to ask you your views on this at a later date.

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