Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do we need to rethink what free software is?

mjg59.dreamwidth.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 153 posts

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

#141

Post by jraph »

temac wrote: post #136
amenod wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you run it? Read its code? Redistribute it verbatim? Make modifications to the code for private use? Redistribute the modifications? Then it's free software. Your answer proves that GP has a point: Commons Clause (on top of Apache for instance) fits your requirements perfectly, yet it is not "free software" according to FSF/OSI definitions. There are degrees to freedom, and while FOSS activists would like to pa…

"Common Clause" prevents everybody to run it for "any purpose". Of course it does not fit the requirement for free software. I doubt that "can you run it?" is meant to be interpreted as: "can you run it, sometimes?"

Indeed. The actual definition says: "The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0)." I simplified too much.

To GP:

> There are degrees to freedom, and while FOSS activists would like to paint issues black and white, they really are not

There are software that are free software, and software that are not free software. This is the whole point of a good definition. Actually assessing whether a program is free software might be hard, but at the end no software is between free software and non-free software.

Now we can argue on a level of freedom but we are not talking about this definition anymore.

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

#142

Post by bitwize »

temac wrote: post #134
bitwize wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes they spill their spaghetti so willingly that all talk of ulterior motives becomes moot. And if they can't change the norms of the community, fracturing it beyond repair is fine with them because it doesn't deserve to exist if it does not conform to their moral standards.

I do not think that there is a coordinated effort whatsoever to disrupt Free Software communities (at least not at industrial scale, maybe there are groups of 3 or 4 people with a similar mindset doing things together, but that is the case for pretty much anything on earth...), only - and especially in this case - personal opinions and approaches I sometimes strongly disagree with. Here to the point of not even under…

It takes "industrial scale" to build a large building, but not to burn one to the ground. The people involved in disrupting the community are relatively small in number, but they've developed an MO that lets them do great damage. They identify leadership of the targeted community, demand that they submit or be removed, and if neither of those happen they start contacting the sources of the community's funding.

If you decide to speak out against the Church of Scientology, a Scientologist may show up at your door telling you to stop. If you don't stop, your boss at work will start to get anonymous calls about you, exposing what a horrible person you are -- perhaps a sexual harasser, rapist, or child molester. Their story will be backed up -- by other Scientologists (who won't identify as such).

As for where Matthew is coming from, the details of that are not so important as that the Right People are in leadership of the community. If the community is not led by the Right People in service to the Right Ideas, then it is part of the system of White-Supremacist-Capitalist-Patriarchy, does not deserve to exist at all, and should be destroyed. And yes, Matthew "Ted Ts'o is a Rape Apologist" Garrett is one of the Right People (though thankfully, Ts'o seems to have a bit more spine than Stallman, so the smear didn't work nearly as well as was hoped).

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

#143

Post by DangitBobby »

daenz wrote: post #102
DangitBobby wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are making a new missile system and all of the free (as in beer) software you want says you can't use it to kill people, then you suddenly have to pay a lot more money to make your missile system. That seems like a good thing to me. I don't see how you could claim that it wouldn't be influencial if this became standard practice.

>then you suddenly have to pay a lot more money to make your missile I assume you're talking about a government or government contractor, because anybody else wouldn't care about "licensing" if they're building a system to kill people. In the former case, "pay a lot more money" means spending more of everyone else's tax dollars, which they definitely won't have a problem with.

Many advanced weapons systems are made by companies like Ratheon.

I guess I'm operating under the assumptions that behavior under capitalism can be influenced by pricing, but government vendors may be a bad example.

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

#144

Post by DangitBobby »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #97
DangitBobby wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are making a new missile system and all of the free (as in beer) software you want says you can't use it to kill people, then you suddenly have to pay a lot more money to make your missile system. That seems like a good thing to me. I don't see how you could claim that it wouldn't be influencial if this became standard practice.

The question is whether it could ever become standard practice, or whether "no-killing-people" software would inevitably just become a hobby ecosystem that nobody seriously considers running a business with.

If people were actually committed to enforcing the ethics they espouse then there wouldn't really be a question, if such options were available. I agree that these are the things the discussion is ultimately about, and free software foundations taking it seriously might make it possible to be more than just a hobby ecosystem.

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

#145

Post by prepend »

jraph wrote: post #36
prepend wrote: post #23

This article confuses me. It seems to be calling for FSF to think about addressing the needs of non-free software.

I think it is calling for the FSF to think about addressing a potential unwanted fragmentation of the free software community over opinions on ethical uses of software and solutions based on restriction from licenses.

I don’t think that’s the right case for the FSF. I think maybe OSI or one of the standards bodies. I’m not sure the precedent for any body to do what the author suggests. So some new org.

It would be like the AMA deciding medical procedures couldn’t be performed on unethical people.

It’s a neat idea, but not sure why author thinks FSF would consider this as ver suggestion is not free.

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

#146

Post by michaelbrave »

rubbingalcohol wrote: post #34
atoav wrote: post #33

Earlier 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…

The thing about freedoms is that they are collective cultural decisions and priorities. An extreme example slavery. The right to not be owned by someone is in direct contrast of someone else's right to property. We have collectively as a western society determined that was wrong and misguided, wars were fought over it to the point we consider it a ridiculous juxtaposition today.

I believe the right to bear arms is at a similar crossroads with those who want the right to feel safe from the government and those who want to feel safe from others. Who's freedom is more important?

Although I think these arguments are against what free software is, maybe it's a discussion worth having, maybe there is something that was missed.

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

#147

Post by kemitchell »

9000 wrote: post #81
rmilejczz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

For your first question, this is mostly about legal interpretability. The GPL has a long text that describes explicitly what it allows and doesn't. Yes, that is based on an ethical framework, but that ethical framework is all baked into the text of the license. There is no ambiguity. The GP contrasts this with the JSON license which only uses the term 'good' to describe what it allows. This is incredibly ambiguous fr…

Legally, there is plenty of ambiguity in the GPLs, v2 and v3.

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

#149

Post by EdSharkey »

falcolas wrote: post #40
EdSharkey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, and good luck acquiring users!

Perhaps acquiring users is not their goal? Open source does not have to be a popularity contest. Sharing for the sake of sharing - for increasing the knowledge of the world at large - is many people’s goal.

The world is absolutely being crushed by "knowledge" right now. What the world needs is wisdom, that's in serious short supply. So what is the wise choice of open source tool in any sector? Some good measures are numbers of stars, forks, weekly downloads on NPM, that kind of thing. Eyes on. Active users.

"Sharing knowledge" is mental masturbation, feel-good, I give back to the community talk. Nothing is given if there are no takers!

"Aquiring users" is modus operandi, million dollar idea, change-the-world talk.

And then there's the real wreckers in this thread who are all on about equality and fairness. Hey wreckers, just put in the work and get users; there's many ways to get paid! My problem with many of you is that you simply can't deliver the goods and are bitter about it.

Maybe you're in the wrong line of business? I've heard the DMV is a delightful place for torturing comrades and ruining civil society.

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

#150

Post by vincent-toups »

johnisgood wrote: post #75
xisukar wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"harm others"... that is extremely subjective. Everyone can claim they have been harmed, say, psychologically or whatever. This is not going to end well. Oh well, I am not surprised.

There are many things which are subjective but that hardly means they are completely ungrounded from human consideration, even when it comes to the exercise of power. The (partial) subjectivity of a measurement isn't a good excuse to completely give up on the domain.
Post reply on HN