For example, I release my code into the public domain to the extent possible. But I am also very strongly opposed to plagiarism. Yet putting code into the public domain means people can legally plagiarize my work.
The real problem is copyright law. Copyright lasts for an absurdly long time, the DMCA which makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection is a threat to general-purpose computing, damages if you lose a copyright case can be astronomical and bankrupt anyone, copyright trolls sue people using stuff instead of using the copyrighted material to make anything themselves, etc.
Copyleft and the AGPL are a judo move that uses the strength of the copyright system against it. If enough stuff were under a strong copyleft license, maybe corporations wouldn't be so enthusiastic about the copyright system. Maybe they would rediscover the benefits of the public domain, since copyright expiring would also liberate copylefted content + software. Perhaps they wouldn't actually help reduce copyright, but they might not work so hard to stop efforts to do so.
I believe that the path to a stronger public domain leads through copyleft + the AGPL. Put your software in the public domain by reducing the power of copyright law, by shortening copyright term length, by reducing the number of things covered by copyright, by putting everything in the public domain, not just the software you control.
I've had this position for well over 10 years. I know why copyleft exists, its philosophical history and how it's intended to use the copyright system against itself. But I disagree with doing that because I want government out of the business of intellectual property altogether and I don't agree with using the copyright system against itself to do it. Fundamentally, I'm opposed to the ownership of ideas at an ideological level, so I wish to relinquish as much of that ownership as I can in today's system. And that's public domain.
We could have a longer discussion, but like I said, this is totally distinct from the argument I'm making that it's not "common sense" to consider laws and ethics the same.
I just think refusing to use copyleft is unwise on a strategic level. It smells like unilateral disarmament to me. If a warlord is rampaging through the countryside putting villages to the sword, it's not good enough to say, "Hey, I don't agree with stabbing people to death." It's great if you have a plan to stop the pillaging without stabbing anyone, but if you don't, then you need to consider plans that do involve stabbing, or at the very least fielding some stabbers. There may be times when all courses of action involve moral compromise, but inaction always favors the oppressor.
Do you have a plan for fighting copyright without using copyright? If yes, then I withdraw my objection. If not, then I ask you to consider whether using copyleft is better than nothing. The oppressive copyright system will continue doing damage without you.
Otherwise, I just try to behave in a way that is consistent with my ethics, while balancing practical matters. In this case, that means opting out of monopoly copyright interest as much as I can.
And can I just say, I really wish it were possible to have discussions about why ought to be without getting dragged into a tangent about how to get there. Like, we've gone from my taking issue with equating laws and ethics all the way to a critique of my weak activism in pursuit of demolishing the IP regime.
> plagiarism is bad but believing that something is bad doesn't equate to believing that there should be a law to restrict it.
That is pretty much my point, yes.
And this is the whole point of copyleft: turn copyright around itself to ensure user freedom.
If you pick a "public domain" license, or MIT or WTFPL you are just building upon the copyright system in a different way than GPL or some other license or closed source.
You cannot "use" it or "not use it".
Please see my other comments in this thread for more details on my position.
You cannot "use" it or "not use it".
If you pick a "public domain" license, or MIT or WTFPL you
And even if I kept my code under copyright with an attribution license, not all forms of plagiarism would necessarily violate the copyright. For example, ideas and facts generally can't be copyrighted, but one could imagine cases where they can be plagiarized.
So even if I did use a license that requires attribution, that only works insomuch as plagiarism is a violation of copyright. And as we all know, there is a ton of grey area there. But regardless of the grey area, the plagiarism itself is still unethical.
Some interesting bits are here: https://www.plagiarism.org/blog/2017/10/27/is-plagiarism-ill...
Why do you not just pick a license that forbids uses not compatible with your ethical standpoint, and chose to just not enforce the terms should they be violated? This way, companies are likely to respect your intent and preference and you don't have to make use of a legal system you don't support.
> Why do you not just pick a license that forbids uses not compatible with your ethical standpoint, and chose to just not enforce the terms should they be violated? This way, companies are likely to respect your intent and preference and you don't have to make use of a legal system you don't support.
I think that leads to a lot of grey area in terms of what people are and aren't allowed to do with my code. It also kind of presumes that I would ever try to enforce anything, which is itself not just an ideological decision but a decision to be made in light of costs and resources and will.
Since we're now getting deeper into what I personally do, I'll note that in practice, I dual license under the UNLICENSE and the MIT. I use the UNLICENSE because it's goal is to explicitly disclaim monopoly copyright interest while attempting to be a public domain dedication. I also add the MIT because some folks stopped using my code when I only used the UNLICENSE because they were too risk averse and wanted a more established license.
As an aside, an alternative to this dual licensing might be the 0BSD license: http://landley.net/toybox/license.html
It's on spdx: https://spdx.org/licenses/0BSD.html
It's approved by OSI: https://opensource.org/licenses/0BSD
Available on choosealicense.com: https://choosealicense.com/licenses/0bsd/
Unlike the unlicense, google allows it: https://opensource.google/docs/patching/
Secondly, I use the UNLICENSE because it is an ideological statement. The 0BSD is not. Dual licensing with the MIT gives me a very small activist voice while also providing a practical option for the risk averse Googles of the world.
Not a good characterization of the argument. It's a matter of negative rights vs. positive rights. The original commenter's argument was cogent.
In copyright, the default is that no one has rights to your creations but you. In licensing it as open source, you're broadening what others can do with it. It's an active choice. If granting someone X could result in them doing X where they otherwise wouldn't, and you'd be uncomfortable with that, then don't go out and invite people to do X.
The hackneyed "common sense ain't so common" aphorism is certainly something to avoid though.
> Yes, folks, if you don't like the idea of a corporation taking your ("software-as-a-service") code and using it to create and sell proprietary products, then maybe don't license your code under the MIT License (or any of the others which explicitly allow exactly that)!
As for:
> In copyright, the default is that no one has rights to your creations but you. In licensing it as open source, you're broadening what others can do with it. It's an active choice. If granting someone X could result in them doing X where they otherwise wouldn't, and you'd be uncomfortable with that, then don't go out and invite people to do X.
Well, I don't think giving people a legal grant to do X is inviting them to do X, especially in the context of permissive licenses or public domain dedications. Otherwise, you could accuse me of inviting people to do X for any value of X, no matter how pernicious.
For the reason just stated:
"It's a matter of negative rights vs. positive rights."
You're say the license prohibits certain things, which isn't true. It's copyright law that prohibits, by default, almost everything. Choosing a public license to make something FOSS is an active choice that selectively enables more use for people who follow the cultural and legal patterns you do like. That a person while doing so doesn't also enable even the uses one doesn't like is not what you're characterizing it as: an active effort to prohibit those things. Wide open, MIT-like permissive reuse is not the default.
Bottom line is that laws and ethics aren't the same. A legal grant to do something (even if it isn't the default) doesn't constitute an invitation to do something unethical.
And I stand by my characterization. The parent post was literally talking about prohibiting things one doesn't like.
Indeed. Based on your other comments in the thread, it looks like you're committed to not understanding.
> The parent post was literally talking about prohibiting things one doesn't like
The parent post was literally talking about not talking extra effort to whitelist things they don't like. There's a real difference between that and what you're saying, and whether you want to acknowledge it or not doesn't change whether that distinction exists.
Ah okay, so you're troll. Please don't bother communicating with me in the future.
If I buy a copy of a wp theme and use it am I passing it off as my own work and would it be called plagiarism?
So if you insist, I suppose change my statement from "not use the legal system at all" to "use the legal system to enforce as few things as possible given its current framework."
If you think laws and ethics are the same or should be, then I suppose that's a deeper disagreement and not one I mean to explore here. :-)
But licenses are not only for legal purpose, they also serve to communicate the authors preference for the prospective users. Of course you can communicate it otherwise, but using a common license is generally pretty easy way of doing it. But I think it is really important that the preference is communicated in some sufficiently clear and explicit manner.
If I did do that, the funny thing is that it might end up having the exact opposite effect! Human nature and all that.
I think licenses communicate legal things. Some things, like copyleft, use copyright as a hack to inject its ethics into the legal system. But that's one specific and very intentional case, and is definitely not something that is commonplace among software licenses. (Typically, when people try to do it, it has a Not Good outcome.)
No, but placing something to public domain is easily interpreted as explicit "please plagiarize", so it would be good to counter that message with something if that is not the message intended.
I've never heard of anyone interpreting public domain as any such thing. Whenever I get an idea from the SQLite source code for example, I have never for even a single moment ever considered plagiarizing it.
If public domain were really treated as you say, then movies and TV shows about Sherlock Holmes wouldn't begin (or end) with "Based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle." They'd just say, "Sherlock Holmes was conceived, written and created by Foo Johnson." But of course nobody does that, because plagiarism is unethical.
Well, there's two ways to do that.
I think we would agree that my ethics shouldn't change to match the law, because the law might be wrong.
But the law should change to match my ethics, if and only if my ethics are right. (Figuring out what ethics are right is left as an exercise)
So if I don't want my project to be used outside the terms of the AGPL, I don't see the problem with releasing it under the AGPL.
If you're against all forms of intellectual property you could just say that and clear things up.
But I'd rather not give up my IP rights before corporations do.
Yes, I am. But the validity of intellectual property isn't relevant to my argument in general I think. It just so happens to be true in my case.
I'm not sure laws should change to match our ethics to be honest. But I think that's part of the "deeper disagreement" I alluded to in my parent comment.
The only problem is that if your software becomes somehow well-known, you'll be bugged to no end to release it into any license, and you will need to develop an anti-spam filter to automatically delete these mails.
I was a little coy above. I said that I "release my code into the public domain to the extent possible." In practice, I dual license my code under the UNLICENSE (public domain, effectively) and the MIT. I do this because the UNLICENSE is unsuitable either because people are too risk averse for it or because public domain is for one reason or another not recognized in their jurisdiction.
I didn't elaborate on this in my original comment because it's not really pertinent. I think.
But yes, I can't put code out there without a license because I ultimately want people to use it. And I've made the mistake of using a license that people don't like to use before (the WTFPL). You do indeed get bugged quite a bit.
The concept of copyright existed long before software licenses and long before the (c) symbol.
It often applies automatically if you sing a song in a park, scribble an article on a napkin, paint a giraffe on your car - no matter how "casual" your artwork might seem.