A reminder that you should double-check the licenses for software you use
github.com
github.com
So adtech, spam farms, and extortion are A-OK, but no genitals. Channeling my inner Olsen, "You got it, dude."
If I leave a pie to cool on my windowsill and you take it it's still stealing even if there was no formal agreement or security measures in place to protect the pie.
Adtech is kind of like that. If I give a calendar app access to my contacts I certainly don't expect it to take that information and use it for tracking, targeting, and marketing purposes as well. For me to "give" you that information for free, you'd have to ask for it honestly. And yet Facebook - an ad tech company - has been fighting this kind of consent in the next iOS patch tooth-and-nail.
This is a excellent analogy, thank you.
Ask me how I know.
We took it to a lawyer but he said that it's clearly blackmail but it would be extremely hard to get any kind of judgement against it. We just ignored it and that company eventually folded and disappeared and the website with them, but I'm pretty sure it made hiring somewhat more difficult for a while.
I was interested since I believe we need the sort of quality-control that these review websites offer - the problem is the corruption of the review process that often (always?) takes place, and the crudeness of the review parameters. Google Pagerank (or whatever it is called nowadays) is not a satisfactory quality sifting tool.
> The definition of what is "good" can be considered highly subjective [...blah blah] the definition of what is "good" and "pure", come from the Word of God, The Holy Bible. The Katharos License is based on the premise that the full 66 books of the Holy Bible are 100% true and inspired by God and that He alone is the ultimate authority for what is good and just.
Says it all really.
> Katharos Technology is a team that wants to make video games and other content and technology to the glory of God.
Things would be much harder if we wouldn't have such standards. Imagine a software ecosystem with a wild variety of licensing terms with all kinds of crazy clauses.
Remember that the next time some company with a deceptive "it's not open source, but we surely want it to sound like open source" license comes along. I was downvoted plenty of times trying to argue for more honesty from those players.
For example I cannot use GPL at work (based on my own rules as team lead) but am open to it in personal projects.
And other folks would consider having something NOT GPL licensed to be suspect.
It is not possible to provide a uniform license that will be acceptable to all in all circumstances.
That seems like a waste if there would be otherwise be projects around with a nonstandard license that was acceptable to a subset of users.
For example the CPython interpreter (the official interpreter for the Python language) does not use a standard license. Would you not want Python to exist?
People are dunking on trying to figure out what is considered "excessively gory".
What does "welcoming and inclusive language" mean?
>I've stated some of my views about other political issues, about activities that are or aren't unjust. Your views might differ, and that's precisely the point. If we accepted programs with usage restrictions as part of a free operating system such as GNU, people would come up with lots of different usage restrictions. There would be programs banned for use in meat processing, programs banned only for pigs, programs banned only for cows, and programs limited to kosher foods. Someone who hates spinach might write a program allowing use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan might allow use only for spinach. There would be music programs allowed only for rap music, and others allowed only for classical music.
>The result would be a system that you could not count on for any purpose. For each task you wish to do, you'd have to check lots of licenses to see which parts of your system are off limits for that task.
>How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing any usage restrictions whatsoever in free software would mainly push users towards nonfree software. Trying to stop users from doing something through usage restrictions in free software is as ineffective as pushing on an object through a long, soft, straight piece of spaghetti.
His words are just as valid about this license as they are about the various "ethical open source" licenses that have proliferated in recent years, whether they be of the "don't let Amazon host our code" variety or the "totally not a thinly veiled vehicle for injecting social justice politics into software" sort.
However, for something as fundamental as an operating system (so long as it is a commodity), it does make sense to have a liberalized base of restrictions on use.
Injecting social justice politics is fine. Politics are present everywhere. People should express their opinions and live their lives in accordance with them. The US in particular has an obsession with pretending there is such a thing as apolitical when it comes to economic activity.
Which leads to fun situations where you have to determine what is or isn't "commercial use." Truly free and open licenses make that a non-issue, meaning software using them are more likely to become widely adopted, which is the entire point of the FOSS movement.
>Injecting social justice politics is fine. Politics are present everywhere. People should express their opinions and live their lives in accordance with them.
People are free to believe whatever they like, but creating (largely legally unenforceable) licenses to do so only hurts the adoption of free software (and helps large commercial entities developing proprietary software). See, for example, Bruce Perens's comments on the Berkeley SPICE license, which explicitly disallowed use by the police of South Africa. Even after Apartheid ended the police of South Africa were barred from use:
https://perens.com/2019/09/23/sorry-ms-ehmke-the-hippocratic...
Any license that places restrictions on what software can be used for makes the entire free software world a minefield.
Commercial use is pretty easy to understand though: are you making money in excess of costs and are not non-profit? Commercial use.
I suppose there are cases where a non-profit can violate the spirit of the law. That's for the courts to decide or you can make it clear by saying non-profits are okay no matter what.
Let's say we have a non-commercial photo-editing application, call it NCIMP. You're a hobbyist photographer, so your buddy wants to pay you to take wedding photos for him. That's a commercial use, right? Better get that commercial license... which you might not be able to get if there are hundreds of contributors to NCIMP and they don't have any organisation to whom they're assigning copyright.
So from the end user perspective, either you're paying an organisation for a commercial license, in which case it's not that different from just getting a license for Photoshop (sure, you'd have to pirate Photoshop to get it for free, but they only really go after commercial users for copyright infringement anyway and they mainly rely on employees to snitch), or you've sunk time into learning how to use a photo-editing application to develop skills you can't even accept compensation for... At which point, you may as well just have learned how to use Photoshop to begin with; if you're starting to learn photography even as a hobby, why choose to either limit yourself to never being able to take a photography gig or have to relearn new software for the same task? Even if you don't plan on doing any paid work, it doesn't make sense to use it unless the software is much better, which it probably won't be if it's being developed by exclusively hobbyist photographers who themselves can't use it for any professional work.
Music and books have a lot of similarities to software in that the cost of copying is nearly free and people want to use stuff everywhere.
Music and books aren't maintained and don't require it. An old song or an old book doesn't change. You can create new songs and new books based on old songs and old books, but they're different things. In contrast, software is in a never-ending battle against irrelevancy. You could use an old version of a piece of software, but then you can't open new versions of the file format for the same piece of software. You can always enjoy an old song or book, but old software will become less and less useful over time.
Songs and books typically have a limited and closed number of contributors. If people remix works, they remix an original, or a cover - the authorship chain is much shorter than what we see with software, which can in contrast involve hundreds of authors. If you want a license type involving a commercial license, you're going to have to need some sort of copyright assignment - and at that point, you've just created a corporation that sells commercial licenses for software. If you don't do this, anyone who wants to use it for commercial purposes will then have to track down a couple hundred authors and ask each of them for a commercial license. What if one of the refuses no matter what the price is? And then we end up in the second case, where the software can only ever end up used by amateurs.
Of course you can have a software project run by only a handful of people - but then they either have to refuse any and all outside contributions, or they have to require copyright assignment.
These sorts of problems can exist with the GPL if your business is selling GPL exceptions (e.g. Qt), but you don't have to do that to make money off of GPL software. And whereas a consumer of GPL software has zero reason to care about whether the software is GPL or BSD or MIT or whatever because they're probably not modifying and distributing it (and hence zero reason to ever require an exception), a consumer of software requiring noncommercial use will inevitably have to pay attention to this sort of stuff and require an exception for something as simple as turning a hobby into a side gig.
Based on what we see in the music industry I suggest we don't do this.
"Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love"
(proverbs 5:19)
>sex trafficking - human trafficking
- slavery
- indentured servitude
- warfare
- weapons manufacturing - war crimes
- violence ( except when required to protect public safety )
- weapons of mass destruction
- sexually suggestive or explicit images, artwork, or any other media
- excessively gory and/or violent images, artwork, or any other media
- abortion - murder - mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information
- hate speech or discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality
>The Work shall not be used by any person, entity, product, service or other use that (i) lobbies against, discourages, or frustrates the following activities or (ii) that derives a majority of income from actions that discourage, or frustrate the following activities:
-peaceful assembly and association (including worker associations)
-democratic processes
- sex trafficking
Sodom and Gomorrah
- human trafficking
- slavery
- indentured servitude
Neither slave nor free in Christ Jesus.
- warfare
- weapons manufacturing - war crimes
- violence ( except when required to protect public safety )
- weapons of mass destruction
They will beat their spears into ploughshares and swords into pruning hooks.
- sexually suggestive or explicit images, artwork, or any other media
And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out
- excessively gory and/or violent images, artwork, or any other media
- abortion - murder
Thou shalt not kill
- mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information
??? The Bible does say little on mass surveillance for some reason.
- hate speech or discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality
Has no-one condemned you? Then neither do I.
-peaceful assembly and association (including worker associations)
Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. (But I can't give a reference for unions!)
-democratic processes
Give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
> The Katharos License is based on the premise that the full 66 books of the Holy Bible are 100% true and inspired by God and that He alone is the ultimate authority for what is good and just.
vs.
> hate speech or discrimination based on age, gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, religion, nationality
Just think about "Thou shalt have no other gods before me".
"I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet."
-1 Timothy 2:12
Mark licenses that "require further attention".
So that "reminder" seems appropriate and package managers that download arbitrary cruft should have a license acceptance field somewhere to reject anything that's incompatible.
>The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability. They view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave. This is a one-way promise, or covenant. In other words, the developers are saying: "We will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us."
Nothing wrong with having an ideal to strive for, even if you aren't always living up to it.
Opposition to this idea was very poorly received.
What makes this any different? Are we for using OSS to try and drive morality, or not?
(My answer is no to both accounts, for the record, and hasn't changed.)
There are various engineering codes of ethics. Without looking, I think both the ACM and IEEE have them. I'd observe though that doesn't keep engineers from working on nuclear weapons for example. Which one may or may not agree with.
In general, I don't think the idea of ethical licenses which was at least a somewhat hot topic in certain circles a while back really was a popular idea overall. And, in any case, I haven't heard it come up for a while.
"Haha, look at those old fashioned religions and their quaint religious texts. How shocking that someone would not know how to behave if it weren't for some words on a page. Anyways, I've just submitted a pull request to update the terms on our code of ethics that all users are bound to adhere to. It's very important to use the software to advance social causes!"
sex trafficking ..."
So I can use the Work for a product that does not derive the majority of income from sex trafficking, etc.
Also, what is "excessively gory"? One arm chopped off ok, two is excessive?
I wonder if they really thought this through...
What I made sure to be part of my very popular answer on the OSS stack exchange about GPL, is a very careful perspective I have on this whole licensing debate. And that is, a license should be understood as fundamentally "about" what you are willing to sue over. Like, folks take a very moral view of licenses, what "should" you do with the software, what "can't" you do with it, etc., and the pragmatic statement is: you can do things, you just might get sued. A license is saying what conditions will definitely not brook a lawsuit.
When you start to see licenses-as-lawsuits, the BSD and MIT licenses are just like "look I don't want to sue you and I don't want you to sue me, let's agree to not do that." The GPL is much more "look I don't want to sue you and I don't want you to sue anybody else and I would be willing to sue you to stop you from suing other people," which is why it is much much longer than those other languages, that's a much more subtle point.
This is just saying "look I for the most part don't want to sue you but if I find out that you are promoting things that I find deeply morally offensive, such as {insert list of topics} then I might sue you if you're using my software for that." There's nothing too "not-thought-through" about this, it's just a matter that might have to be litigated where you say "look I don't personally lobby for abortion, just abortion-lobbyists use my platform" and some lawyers make some reasonable cases on both sides and some judge decides on some clarifying line as a result of the argument.
On the other hand, the other point of my previous comment is not open to interpretation: Not the majority of income is fine and because they use 'or' the fact that I lobby, promote, or support is irrelevant and all that matters is the majority of income. So I can use the Work for a free app that promotes abortion, for example. This is permitted although this is contradicting what they seem to want to achieve.
Or even a client's client.
E.g., Paypal might be deriving income from sex trafficking if a sex worker takes payment via it.
Not that the rest of the license is unworkably vague, but that limitation at least makes some sense.
Given that the licensed software is a library intended for use in game development, this is actually an important question!
Gore:
> For the indignation of the LORD is upon all nations, and his fury upon all their armies: he hath utterly destroyed them, he hath delivered them to the slaughter. Their slain also shall be cast out, and their stink shall come up out of their carcases, and the mountains shall be melted with their blood. (Isaiah 34)
Sex:
> Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. (Ezekiel 23)
So, you know, as long as you go easy on the depiction of BBQ and shrimp, you're probably going to be OK.
https://github.com/katharostech/ldtk-rs/blob/master/LICENSE....
Most OSes have a license restricting use in nuclear power plants. This license adds similar restrictions like “cannot use in adtech”. :)
People can write and use a license with any restrictions they want; there are plenty of proprietary licenses out there. I hope such licenses don't get used or propagated by anyone else, but people are still free to write them. But it would be especially problematic if people use code under such a license, or worse, put new code under such a license, while thinking they're using an Open Source license.
> The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil
This sounds all good and well, and in theory is great, but in practice how does this work? Who defines what is "Good", and what is "Evil".
Admittedly this license is much more targeted but there are a few ambiguous ones:
> sexually suggestive or explicit images, artwork, or any other media
the understanding of what is explicit varies wildly between different cultures across the world; which understanding is applicable here? Can an art gallery/auction house that sells lots of portraits use this software? Does it depend where the art gallery is located geographically (and what if it has many sites around the world)?
> mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information
What counts as surveillance? For example, can I use my software to track where you as a user go? I guess not. But then what if I then say it's for a "rent a bike" service, that has a partnership with the local city, which uses that data to figure out where to build cyclepaths?
I'm not saying that the objectives the license is trying to achieve aren't worthy goals (and perhaps the example use cases I gave have nothing to do with the project). I just think that the practical situation ends up being more complicated in the end than writers of the license intend.
All of LICENSE file i've seen so far is lacking of a short recap.
I suspect HN is pretty heavily left-learning atheist, which is leading us to immediately dismiss an otherwise not-crazy idea because of a particularly crazy example.
I suppose I'd like to know if there are some morality clauses that could be considered reasonable? Especially that of weapons/war.
Even the bits that contradict each other?
Are there legal implications of this premise being false? God is imaginary https://godisimaginary.com/.
Also the bible is ok with stuff such as slavery, can I use the software to promote slavery?