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Open Source Mythology

lgug2z.com

28 pointsyreew18 comments

Important note that this is window manager for _Windows_.

The venn diagram for "people who give a shit about FOSS licences" and "people who daily drive Windows" is nearly two circles.

I beg to differ, unless you also include the group "People who give a shit about FOSS licenses, but are forced by their job to use windows anyway"

I think “people who daily drive Windows” is an invalid set for comparison here.

I suspect there is a lot more overlap if you instead consider “people who give a shit about FOSS licences” in relation to “people who know what a tiling window manager is and want to use one, and daily drive Windows”.

Exactly, if you don't care about being included in a distribution's repository, you don't have to care about an OSI approved licence.

Installing third party software is much easier on Windows.

The license says "you may not distribute the software or new works based on the software".

Komorebi's readme says "Anyone is free to make their own fork of komorebi with changes intended either for personal use or for integration back upstream via pull requests."

These texts seem to contradict each other, especially as there's no way to make a fork on GitHub without also distributing the software.

If I put on my "totally-uncharitable" hat, it seems this author, and the author of the "PolyForm Strict License" on which it was based, are stupid, self-righteous and don't understand the basics of copyright licensing.

The topic a not-entirely-open-source license the author has apparently created, and is defending.

As an illustration: the author uses a Mao Zedong quotation as one of his points.

thank you for pointing this out! i probably would not have bothered to click through if i hadn't seen this comment, and i would have missed a well-articulated stance on an issue i think about every time i pick a license: whether or not freely sharing my work will have a net positive effect on the world.

on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.

i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.

Likewise - at first I was prepared for this to be another weird permutation of MIT/BSD or something but once I got further into the article I understood the author's point (and agreed!) about claiming (at least a symbolic) right of refusal to allow one's work to be used for ill.

I don't know how enforceable that becomes, and I know that people the author refers to as dogmatists may be quick to point out the flaws (on some level it reminds me of pharmacists who refuse to dispense medications on personal grounds - eg, contraceptives or diabetic supplies to people they suspect of drug use).

But I think the conversation is valuable - there is a moral/ethical dilemma for many of us who truly love computing, when faced with a job market that consists largely of For-Profit Corporations And Governments Doing Bad Things (obviously this is personal and relative).

Mr Crockford has trolled the entire industry with the JSON license: https://www.json.org/license.html It states that it can be used for good, but not for evil.

The problem is, of course, in the lack of an established, clear-cut, whole-society consensus on what is good and what is evil, and also in the inability of humans to formally define even their own criteria for that. As with porn, "I can recognize it when I see it" is a bit shaky ground for legal matters.

Speaking of the For-Profit Corporations, the profit is what pays the wages of those they employ, so, unless you agree to do programming (or any professional activity) entirely as a pastime,..

The revenue is what pays the wages. Wages are a business expense, not an optional benefit. I don’t like this response. It comes across as very “but you use a cell phone” to me. Yes, the world we live in is fueled by profit. It’s not a good thing to me.

> an apt choice of essay

he said "apt" nyuck nyuck

I've skimmed the post, and I've clicked through to the license[0], but I'm not clear on what is meant by "firewall license"?

Is it just that the license doesn't allow use by corporations, and that's why they say the target audience is:

> Those who reject genocide-friendly software licensing

Can someone help me grok it a little better?

[0] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi-license

Basically the license permits you to use the source code for education, compiling builds for individual personal use (no sharing!), and proposing changes to upstream via a fork on github.com. That's it. The part about corporations is just to contrast it to their upstream license to explain that this license does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use.

It takes some assumptions to make sense of the "firewall" part. I'm strawsteelmanning here:

- There are Bad People

- If Bad People successfully use my software, it will lead to Bad Things

- The Good Things caused by permissive licenses are more than offset by (or can't compensate for) by the harm done by BP

- My software enables the harm and it wouldn't happen to the same extent without it

- The only way to mitigate this is to retain authority to decide exactly who gets to do what with the source

- Under an Open Source license I am unable to refuse Bad People from using or resharing my software

It follows that any software with enough adoption available under a free license will lead to Bad Things. Therefore the only ethical license is one where the author retains this absolute discretion/power to tell BP "no". This discretion is the "firewall". The inability of the author to arbitrarily forbid users from adopting the software is the "lost right to refusal of the individual" mentioned.

When taken just a bit further it's not too dissimilar to resigning to the reality that we must outlaw strong cryptography and restrict access to general computing and "powerful AI" to only identifiable and accountable non-BP because criminals and terrorists means we can't have nice things and slavery is freedom.

Don't let the fancy quotes and rhetoric give you the illusion that there're any deep insights behind this. Tankies gotta tank.

I do not find it compelling and will continue to promote free software.

I also found that confusing. My guess as to what they mean is that if someone makes changes, they are not obligated to share them with the world?

That is, they are against free and indiscriminate sharing, which would allow bad people to use their software.

They link directly to this Q&A in the OSI FAQ:

> Can I stop “evil people” from using my program?

> No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.

You can very much restrict software from being used in certain ways and for certain purposes and still be Open Source. Focus more on the "how" than the "who".

Making the claim that OSI necessitates "genocide-friendly licenses" is not a constructive direction.

OP could conceivably have come up with an alternative license preserving the freedoms without allowing the uses they disagree with. They chose the easier path, which is by itself fine. Painting the entire FLOSS community as genocide enablers and claiming there is no middle ground as long as the author is not in complete control of all redistribution and derivatives ("right to refuse") is unnecessary.

Not that this is a good idea, but how do you suppose a window manager could be modified so that it's not useful for "bad" purposes?

It seems difficult to do for general-purpose software.

I'm saying you could forbid it in the license. Like some licenses might allow personal but not non-commercial use, you could come up with other disallowed uses. Seems like a better idea than attempting to limits its use to your in-group.

Okay

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