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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

> With the Katharos License we want to promote the openness, sharing, and collaboration that is common in the Open Source community, while at the same time protecting the people who may otherwise become victims of the destructive application of our shared works. We want the works that we share to be uplifting and helpful and we want them to be used to benefit people.

So adtech, spam farms, and extortion are A-OK, but no genitals. Channeling my inner Olsen, "You got it, dude."

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The first two could qualify as 'mass surveillance and/or stealing of private information' depending how liberally that's interpreted. Extortion is already illegal, anyway (but then again, so are many of the prohibited activities in this license, although I suppose it's not illegal to simply 'support' them as this license prohibits).

its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free or if it's just metadata, nothing immoral there

Could be mass surveillance, depending on how liberally that's interpreted.

> its not stealing if people are giving that information out for free

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.

> 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.

This is a excellent analogy, thank you.

Isn't that the Office Space crime rationalization?

Extortion is illegal, and yet, 'mugshot' businesses continue to operate in the open.

Not to mention all sort of "review" websites where your company is suddenly flooded with extremely negative reviews and you get a helpful call from the website owner being like "hey, I see you got a lot of bad reviews, but don't worry, for only $5000 you can get our premium membership that lets you get them removed".

Ask me how I know.

How do you know?

Because it happened to my company. A "review your employer" website went from having few reviews of us to literally having few thousand reviews in a week(which in itself was a dead giweaway as we had maybe 50 employees total with 100 over the lifetime of the company), all extremely negative, but very simple and vague in content so you couldn't make a legal case against any one of them.

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.

OK thanks. Good to hear that the problem went away in your case.

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.

I think it's meant as a joke... you need to read a bit further before you hit the "oh this is _supposed_ to be complete BS" part:

> 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.

It’s not. This is on their website linked from the GitHub profile:

> Katharos Technology is a team that wants to make video games and other content and technology to the glory of God.

Not a joke actually. Here's their About Us page https://katharostech.com/about-us

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