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Lerna relicences to protest ICE

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Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#71

Post by cazum »

voidr wrote: post #54

It would be really funny if at least one of the following would happen: - the companies on the list would band together and fork lerna - one of the projects that lerna depends on would tell them that they are no longer welcome to use their code because they hold the opposite belief - the lerna community to implode because maybe not all the 169 contributors hold the same political position Mixing software with politic…

>Mixing software with politics never ends well in a democracy.

This is just so obviously absurd, in order to give you the benefit of the doubt, I need have to assume that you and I must have functionally different definitions of what "political" means

All software licenses and ToS are political. The GPLs clause about upholding the essential freedoms is political.

Enforcing age restrictions on porn websites is politics.

You can't really escape it.

In a plutocracy (the system in the United states) laws are created by those with power (corporations and their lobbyists). If citizens hold any potential power over these corporations to uphold the will of the people, it should be their civic duty to flex on the nerds throwing children in torture prisons.

If your main objection to this is that it might split the community of an open source project, might I remind you that this software is being used by the tyrants throwing children into torture prisons and tearing apart families for ever. This is worth getting into some OSS politics over.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#72

Post by bdhess »

leereeves wrote: post #33
roblabla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still the MIT license for other people though. Licenses are a contract between a licensor and and a licensee. OSS requires the Licensor to provides the license in a non-discriminating way, and some licenses, like the GPL, explicitly enforce this. But the MIT license itself has no such provision. You could license a project with MIT to user A, and not to user B. This is all just rule-bending though. I'm very conf…

It's not the MIT license for other people if it doesn't allow those other people to distribute it as they choose (including giving it to ICE).

Strangely, ICE itself isn’t on their list.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#73

Post by jordigh »

Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #70
jordigh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're honouring the terms of the original license. The terms of the original license says they're allowed to redistribute however they wish ("including without limitation the rights to [...] sublicense"). They are redistributing with additional restrictions and sublicensing. It's just as valid as grabbing MIT-licensed software making some changes, and licensing those changes under the GPL. Now you can distribute a…

I'm not sure I can be any more explicit than my previous comment, but I'll try. You can't just grab a permissive license, like MIT, ignore it, and go, "Hey, this is GPL now." That's entirely incorrect. You cannot ever ignore the terms of a license, just because you want to use another license. You must under all circumstances, honour the terms of the license for which you were granted the right to reproduce someone-e…

> You can't just grab a permissive license, like MIT, ignore it, and go, "Hey, this is GPL now."

Yes you can, that's sublicensing, which the MIT license allows. It's also why you can include MIT-licensed code in non-free applications. The MIT license does not forbid any of this. And you're not ignoring it when you say the whole work is now covered by the terms of the GPL as the text of the GPL says; you're actually exercising a right granted by the MIT license. I can totally grab MIT-licensed code and redistribute it to you under non-MIT terms[1]. I don't have any obligation to give you any freedom nor do I have an obligation to make sure you can impose GPL-incompatible restrictions on it. I can sublicense as I wish.

You're right that you still have to display the MIT license but that's not really the point. It's a very minor restriction that is not relevant to the point of this discussion. By licensing under the MIT license, the original contributors to Lerna agreed to let their code have additional restrictions imposed upon it such as denying licensing to certain companies. Lerna is still displaying the original MIT license anyway.

--

[1] Although in this day and age of widespread internet distribution, you could just go and grab the original from the original distributor, which may be enough for you if I haven't modified it significantly.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#74

Post by village-idiot »

Waterluvian wrote: post #43

I use BlueprintJS a lot. And about a year into use I realised that "Palantir" is apparently a company people don't like. All I could think about is how this might become a nuisance if a colleague or customer decides they're going to be political about it. These moves are frustrating. I just want to make neat stuff. I don't want to get involved in the politics of a country I have no interest in.

Trying to keep politics out of things isn't apolitical, it's the politics of status quo.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#75

Post by voidr »

exogen wrote: post #69
voidr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used the word politics, I was not talking about ideology or morality, I was referring to politics specifically. > My point was that ideologically and morally motivated software licenses are already well established in the software ecosystem. I don't recall saying that we never had ideologically or morally motivated licenses, best example is JSLint license, which prohibits you from using the software for "evil". > T…

Because if you read the post, the author is clearly making this change on moral grounds, that are only incidentally political to folks who choose to reduce it to that (like you did). Specific immoral actions are named, not political ideologies. The change is not to protest “ICE under conservative leadership.” It’s apparent by now that to many folks, it’s unbelievable that “ICE should not rip toddlers from their famil…

I think we can agree to disagree on this one: I read the article a second time and I still think it's a political move.

> the author is clearly making this change on moral grounds

To me it looks like he is trying to indirectly force the government to do something he wants. If it would be that clearly immoral, then surely one of the higher courts would have had an opinion on it, unless you are willing to make the argument that he is more qualified than a court.

> It’s apparent by now that to many folks, it’s unbelievable that “ICE should not rip toddlers from their families and put them in camps” is something that could be dismissed as just a political opinion valid as any other

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion

We can continue this thread forever, let's just agree to end it and move on.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#77

Post by village-idiot »

ggreer wrote: post #6

How can they change the license without getting the approval of everyone who contributed code? It doesn't look like they required contributors to sign CLAs.

MIT allows sublicensing explicitly. It's why you can include MIT licensed code in proprietary software, something that the GPL is designed to prevent.

What you can't do is retroactively apply this to old code. The named entities could use older versions of the code, but in newer versions the new license would apply.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#78

Post by village-idiot »

leibwiht wrote: post #58
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #30

Slightly off-topic, but: anyone know where I can find a solid debate / discussion on the political issues raised by illegal immigration in the U.S.? My own views lean pretty strongly towards one end of the spectrum, and I simply can't understand why people would hold the opposite views. So I suspect I'm missing something.

There's not really a whole lot to debate. You can bring up statistics and data, but the heart of the issue is not ignorance, but identity. People who are anti-illegal immigration generally only use it as a more polite and socially acceptable proxy for what they really want, which is to reduce or end immigration altogether (except perhaps from places that they share a common identity with). These people don't want imm…

Half of the anti-immigration crowd is absolutely explicit about their racist animus.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#79

Post by village-idiot »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #61
leibwiht wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not really a whole lot to debate. You can bring up statistics and data, but the heart of the issue is not ignorance, but identity. People who are anti-illegal immigration generally only use it as a more polite and socially acceptable proxy for what they really want, which is to reduce or end immigration altogether (except perhaps from places that they share a common identity with). These people don't want imm…

> People who are anti-illegal immigration generally only use it as a more polite and socially acceptable proxy for what they really want, which is to reduce or end immigration altogether (except perhaps from places that they share a common identity with). Could you explain a little about how you made that inference? Nothing in my daily experience leads me to reach the same conclusion.

A lot of the immigration hawks are extremely explicit about immigrants "destroying" our culture, and tend to dogwhistle a lot. A few are explicitly white supremacists.

The wanting more immigrants from "nations like Norway" was a huge tell too.

Re: Lerna relicences to protest ICE

#80

Post by village-idiot »

yellowapple wrote: post #65

So, if I'm understanding this correctly: - Lerna is no longer free software (per the FSF's definitions) or open source software (per the OSI's definitions), so calling it "open source" is inaccurate - Lerna is effectively illegal to host on GitHub, since its license terms prevent GitHub's parent company (Microsoft) from being able to legally distribute it in source form - Lerna probably can't relicense anyway without…

That last bit is not true. MIT allows sublicensing.
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