Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

As a reminder, the OSI was formed as a corporate-friendly foil to Stallman's FSF. This is how the OSI once described its own history on its website:

> The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with "free software" in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

Given that the OSI exists to water down a distinctly moral framework like Free Software into a version that is less "moralizing" and "confrontational" so as to be more appealing to corporations, the path that Open Source has taken over the last few years is hardly surprising.

I've become convinced that the cure for what has been ailing us in the FOSS movement is going to come only as we buck the corporate elements and return to something more closely resembling the original Free Software ethics-based movement. The GPL and AGPL are some of the only licenses not to get totally sucked up in corporate interests, and that's not a coincidence: they were founded on the deeply and sincerely held principle that it is an ethical imperative to advance the good of software's individual human users.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20071115150105/https://opensource...

> The GPL and AGPL are some of the only licenses not to get totally sucked up in corporate interests

Neither of these licenses address the gigantic "internal use" loophole

FSF is also just as dogmatic as OSI in it's refusal to distinguish corporations from individuals

As all is based on copyright you can't distinguish between individuals and organisations as the law does not.

I guess I must have imagined all the licenses which treat individual and corporate use as distinct.

Edit: I'll simplify the above to "the statement in the parent comment is demonstrably not true"

"Don't be snarky"

You can write whatever you want in a license, though. I don't see any issue with writing a license which says 'this may only be used by an individual, not an organisation', though of course there are likely to be significant grey areas which would need to be resolved in court if it came to that.

What I mean is that the copyuright holder can be an individual or a company - no comment on users.

I don't think you need to distinguish individuals from corporations in order to advance human freedom. You can make the licenses such that any corporation that uses them to provide services to users must provide the users with required freedoms. If businesses can make money while respecting those terms, all the better!

The same goes for the internal use loophole: the corporation should be required to provide its internal users with certain freedoms, and if they do that then mission accomplished.

"The purpose of a system is what it does"

And the GPLs have done an extremely good job of advancing user freedom, with a few very small asterisks.

> sucked up in corporate interests

Yes, that's an out of context quote from my earlier comment. I'm not sure what it means as a response to me now, though.

It would have made for a better discussion if you had stated openly that you are into some fringe self-made anti-org software license. That would have made it clear what you actually want to discuss.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Is there a license that does address that loophole?

Such a license would be a non-free software / not open source license.

Maybe the Apple Public Source License v1? Haven't looked at it in a long time.

There are many - but FSF, OSI and their proponents typically advocate quite strongly against their use.

Which ones?

A few things on the "internal use loophole"--first, I'm not sure a semantic debate over the meaning of "distribution" functions as a loophole. Courts are quite capable and ready to consider questions such as these, so I'm not sure it really matters very much. Outside of the academic exercises playing out like this one, actual fact and circumstance relevant to any given case play critically into its ultimate legal determination(s), and 8-12 person juries and/or appeals courts exist to handle things otherwise.

All that said, I'm not sure what your calling this out was meant to imply in the context of the person you quoted?

I note the GPL itself does not differentiate between internal and external use, the "internal use" language comes only from the FSF GPL FAQ.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#InternalDistributi... https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLRequireSourcePo...

So probably a court or a different upstream could interpret distribution as including distribution between employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com