The Culture War in Open Source Is On | Hacker News Reader

The Culture War in Open Source Is On

modelviewculture.com

27 pointstraverseda13 comments

Fairly intersting viewpoint, although disagree with the author (if I interpret the post correctly, English is not my native language). Just ignoring any "ethical" view point (because they are subjective and hard to agree on) and looking just at the practicality of the idea:

> the danger is a mess of unenforceable licenses whose prohibitions become impossible to keep track of

This is imho the most important part; once you start using basically personal license (I mean, each developer (person) has different set of values; some would be fine with military applications, some not; some would be fine with non-profit (doctors without borders) using their code, some would not), it becomes basically impossible to be sure your code is compliant or not.

Once you realize that your would need to basically evaluate every single license in the dependency tree in depth (since they are basically non-standard, personal licenses at this point), it turns into insane amount of work. And expensive, since it would probably needed to be done by a lawyer.

The split between gpl2, gpl3 and apache 1.0 and 2.0 is bad enough already.

Contextually, it makes sense that licencing used to be such a big deal in the history of software distribution. Back in the 70s and 80s there was the real possibility that that FOSS could win and software freedoms could be embedded in the expected legal structure of software distribution. That didn't pan out though. Maybe it is time we move beyond licensing being the focal point of software movements.

The context has changed significantly since the start of the FOSS movement. This new generation of tech enthusiasts aren't trying to build the foundations of an operating system. Increasingly, ethical open source looks like building applications, tools and even platforms that defend end-user freedoms. This shift in emphases is something newer software movements should embrace.

Maybe ethical open source movements should focus more on what the technology enables for end-users rather than on how the project itself is structured or which licence is used.

I couldn't agree more. Well said!

The [Ethical Open Source definition][1] does include three general points on behalf of the end user: accessibility, safety, and privacy. But it does not address the relationship between developers and end users: how do those who will use the software have a voice in what gets developed? And how could it - as you say, it's time to move past licensing as the sole focal point.

[1]: https://ethicalsource.dev/definition/

> how do those who will use the software have a voice in what gets developed

Should they? If they want some feature, they can ask nicely or make a PR. Are there other options?

I'd settle for open API's at this point. And honestly to me seems like a fairly natural way to do "anti-trust" without actually breaking up companies in a potentially destructive way. If other people can make slack clients, or pull "popular times" information from google places, or aggregate instagram live / facebook live videos, that would go a long way towards an open (and competitive!) ecosystem.

Ideally, we'd all be mostly following and investing in extending existing standards for chat/etc. e.g. RFC 1459 doesn't have everything that slack/Teams/etc needs but there's no good reason that Microsoft can't throw some money at IETF to help them grow the standard to what we need for modern business chat.

Separately, I could see anti-trust legislation requiring internal API's to be made accessible to competitors and billed at the same rates as internal API requests from one business segment to another. E.g. Google Maps would pay Google Places for the info that it serves up, but Yahoo Maps could re-skin that info or combine it with other sources as well if they pay the same rates that Google Maps does.

Submitted with the hope that it can be discussed without too much vitriol, although honestly I'm not expecting it to last very long.

We don't get a lot of content from the viewpoint proponents of things like the "ethical source license" (A license that explicitly prevents groups like ICE from using the code). I don't think this article was written with the intention of being divisive, and I'd hope it could offer some insight into the mind-set of that particular sub-culture.

You're dreaming. I stopped reading when it said that most of the contributors are male, but somehow women are being oppressed because the open source work is unpaid.

It didn't say that. At all. That's just a connection you made up. It made the point that outside of technology, in the real world women traditionally do the unpaid labour - housekeeping, raising children, caring for elderly family members, and because of this, they come in with a perspective that's primed to notice that open source work is often unpaid and has a similar dynamic of value accruing to people who aren't responsible for the work.

Restricting the use would mean that it's not classified as open-source as per [1] "6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor", right?

Would that also mean that software released with such restrictions would likely be incompatible with most existing OSS licenses, making it impractical to build on top of existing code?

[1] https://opensource.org/docs/osd

Yes to both, and doing so also makes it non-free per the FSF. Here's what they say about the Anti-996 license [1], as well as about this concept in general [2].

Caveat to the second point: while it is indeed incompatible with copyleft licenses like the GPL, pushover licenses like the MIT license unfortunately are compatible with it, so there probably will be some degree of proliferation of that sort of thing.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#Anti-996

[2] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freed...

As an antidote to at least some of that potential vitriol - thank you, this was an enjoyable read containing good food for thought and useful references.

>Richard Stallman, originator of the first free-and-open license, resigned from the Free Software Foundation last year over comments sympathetic to the late billionaire and molester Jeffrey Epstein.

This is patently false character assassination. This should read instead "Richard Stallman, known high-functioning autist with a broken, abusive childhood, defends Marvin Minsky, the only father figure he's ever had, from posthumous accusations of rape and pedophilia on semi-private mailing list. He was then forced to resign and made homeless after lifelong struggle for freedom and justice at the expense of everything else in his life." But that's certainly not a news story--that's just a tragic inquisition and miscarriage of justice.

I'm sure a bunch of blue herrings (i.e. rabid twitter users) will show up and respond with one or more variation of the following (but with zero facts):

"As a woman in tech, I feel personally threatened by the fact that creepy Stallman is alive and walking around freely, creepily. He should have a muzzle put on him and be defenestrated off the Cliffs of Dover. Otherwise we're still alienating potential contributors."

"Stallman is not the squeaky-clean corporate skinsuit we needed to further our sociopathic power grabs. Even if he was innocent (which he wasn't, he's literally Hitler), he should have been removed years before because he's not the right fit for the position of bootlicking for FAANG and champagne socialists."

"Do you even know how society works? Stallman is the problem. He is literally the personification of everything that is wrong with men and software. Period. How anyone can believe that his behavior is acceptable in 2020 is beyond me. You literally need to see a therapist. This Karl Popper quote taken out of context means I don't have to introspect about stomping on your face. #stallmanisliterallyhitler"

Or, they'll just downvote this comment silently, which shows that they've read this comment, know it's true, and want the public to know that they acknowledge that, but >:(

I find it really difficult to even engage with the issues on this when there's such a toxic conversation around. I literally don't care what the ideological concerns are, if you're going around throwing out accusations and calling people "Marxists" I just don't have the motivation to hear your points.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com