Knee-jerk reaction and discrimination against the Russian people.
In principle this is true given the current Open Source license.
But i would argue that the clause about discrimination is out of touch with reality.
Usage rights to Open Source should not by default be granted to oppressive regimes and the author should absolutely be allowed to state that within the license.
If the west wants to send a clear signal to Putin, then matters such as the wording of the Open Source license needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Bear in mind that I'm talking descriptively rather than prescriptively here. I have my own opinions but I can also observe that political neutrality as a concept is waning.
Im not saying it is necessarily- but i think to get past the division you have highlighted (apolitical universality vs political conservatism) there is perhaps a way to look at the various approaches and determine what approach would be technologically, logistically, and politically advantageous.
Let us let go of the idea it is apolitical, what now?
Remove the free rice and you satisfy your egos necessity for first order moral resolution via punishment- bad people dont get rice- but as for second order effects? Perhaps now it becomes feasible to build a sustainable farm (or apache competitor)
I'm familiar with second order effects, and nth order effects and nonlinear causality. If we restrict Russia's access to Apache Web server, sure, they will eventually develop a local equivalent. So, over time they transition from being disadvantaged to simply leveling the playing field. That's a pretty good outcome, especially if many more open source projects could withdraw from Russia.
IBM is still notorious for their willingness to work with the Nazi regime.
Maybe as a European i feel more strongly about this, but every means possible must be employed to send a clear signal to Russia about the unacceptable state of affairs.
Except destructive changes as in the second example, that behavior should not be allowed by the Open Source license.
I'm still hopeful that a better wording can be found going forward.
When it comes to open source licensing, though, the problem with these kinds of exceptions tends to be that there are a lot of causes that would, at one time or another or from one perspective or another, seem to warrant similar exceptions.
There are other wars going on, with more or less clear aggressors. Should we build a list, somewhat akin to the U.S. export restrictions, that forbade using the software by the aggressive states? How would we make sure that the lists aren't influenced by political leanings or cultural preconceptions? (Hint: you can't.)
It would be objectively easy to argue that people who eat meat should be sanctioned to give them a "clear signal" that they shouldn't. It would be emotionally easy to argue that perhaps we should exclude people who violate human rights from using our software -- although what exactly constitutes such a violation would be pretty hard to delineate. In a different culture, objectively or not, entirely different acts might be considered morally contemptible or even unforgivable.
Allowing exceptions to open source terms based on individual reasons would lead to a jungle of rules that would end up ruining open source, even if each exception by itself can be easy to argue for. You could no longer build a Linux distribution or any kind of a large collection of software, or even an open source application that relied on lots of open source libraries for its functionality.
That is, unless you decided not to include any software that had licenses with any such exceptions. That's exactly what drawing the line for the meaning of "open source" is. If you only take one of those exceptions and not the others, that's no longer an objective choice, and others are going to have different exceptions; if you take them all, you create an untenable mess, or at least a walled garden with really tight walls.
At any given time it may feel like this is the one exception we should make, and it feels right at that moment. It just can't be done with any consistency without massive collateral damage in the big picture.
By all means, let's cause trouble to Russia (under its current regime) as long as it restricts their ability to wage war. Let's do that even if it costs us. But let's not do it in such a way that it creates a massive moral or legal conundrum in the long run. Even if it feels right at the moment.
- Another European, living less than 200 km from Russia
The same thing that happens when two countries have irreconcilable differences.
Software is a human artifact and subject to the same principles as all such artifacts.
The argument that software licenses should exclude certain people or fields of endeavor has been around for decades. Such licenses are outside the scope of Open Source. Specifically, such licenses do not conform to the Open Source Definition clauses 5 and 6:
> 5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
> The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
> The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Furthermore, the label "oppressive regime" is sometimes more propaganda than fact. Many western countries weaponize human rights by labeling enemy states as oppressive regimes, while either ignoring/muffling their own human rights abuses, or (more likely) having systems that allow one to protest against domestic human rights abuses while failing to change a single thing about them no matter how much people protest; and at the same time, turning a blind eye on actual oppressive regimes that happen to be allied states (until they fall out of grace, after which they will once again be labeled "oppressive regimes").
This makes license discrimination on the grounds of the "oppressive regime" label highly problematic and prone to geopolitical propaganda games. At worst, you can even say that such license discriminations become willing tools of geopolitical propaganda.
Direct confrontation is not an option and neither is doing nothing at all, so sanctions is the logical choice.
I agree that sanctions will not make Putin withdraw from Ukraine. But seeing Europe make a targeted effort to stop relying on Russian oil and gas, should make Putin think twice.
China is happy to take it for a cheaper price.
"I've stated above some parts of my views about certain political issues unrelated to the issue of free software—about which of those activities are or aren't unjust. Your views about them 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 license a program to allow use for processing any vegetable except spinach, while a Popeye fan's program might allow only use 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. Not only for the components you explicitly use, but also for the hundreds of components that they link with, invoke, or communicate with."
"How would users respond to that? I think most of them would use proprietary systems. Allowing usage restrictions 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, straight, soft piece of cooked spaghetti."
"It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
Open Source is right now defined as open for everyone by the license, ie. the paragraph about not discriminating.
Perhaps the only sane way for Open Source to exist is to not discriminate.
Secondly, why would any such oppressive regime care about your license? What are you going to do, sue them?
But to be fair, its not discrimination against the Russian people, its discrimination against a particular ideology that is predominantly held by the Russian people.
To be even more fair, it's both.
There are plenty of Russians that absolutely do not agree with what the Russian leadership is doing, but have no choice in the matter.
Speaking as a Canadian, there was a time when we were similarly fighting an adversary and chose to indiscriminately treat all people from that nation as enemies. The result was the internment of Japanese Canadians, one of the most shameful periods in our nation's history.
I cannot help but be very concerned that we're heading down a very familiar and dangerous path, here...
I was treated extremely rudely for being American when I went to France in late 2003, and I totally understood why. I hated my own country and my countrymen for it as well. I still do, in a sense. We owe the Iraqi people an enormous debt of reparations
It seems too easy to say "uh discrimination is fine" when the only thing you have to fear is people being rude to you on vacation. If you face the loss of your livelihood, like the owner of a small Russian restaurant somewhat, I don't think you'd be as sanguine.
That's just the French being the French, would have been the same in the 90's lol. And if you think that's bad, try going there as a French Canadian like my grandfather did. He got treated way waaaay better when he spoke English instead of the his "dirty" (what the Frenchies called it) Quebecois French.
That's racist. And a deny of history about the anti-french sentiment in the USA consequently of the opposition of French to to participate in a war that later you want you never make.
You clearly don't know what the word means. French isn't a race, at most it's a nationality or ethnicity. And in any case I'm 1/4th French, ethnically.
>And a deny of history about the anti-french sentiment in the USA consequently of the opposition of French to to participate in a war that later you want you never make.
I never said there wasn't anti-French sentiment in the US though? Do you have issues with reading comprehension?
Which will never happen. For very obvious reasons. Hypocrisy is our first and last name. And the examples of it are countless.