SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
In our increasingly politicized world, it has become popular to chant "all software is political." Software builds the systems that free or constrain us, the thinking goes, and so we should withhold it from bad people. This is the thinking that has led Microsoft employees and others to decry contracts tech companies have with ICE (US Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement), insisting that their software only be sold to people they like.
[...] Over the years we as an open source community have experimented with all sorts of stupid ideas, like efforts to block anyone from using code for commercial purposes unless they pay. Each time, we've realized that as good a goal as it is for developers to get paid, for example, the destruction caused by closing off the code to uses we don't like ends up ruining the foundations upon which open source rests.
This is dramatically more important, however, when it comes to attempts to politicize open source software.
As developer Chris Cordle stated, "Nobody wins" and the "whole idea [undergirding open source] dies" ... "if an author arbitrarily picks and chooses who can and can't use it based on whoever Twittersphere is mad at this week." It doesn't matter if there is tremendous cause for that anger. Open source dies when it becomes politicized.
Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-politicizing-open-source-is-a-terrible-idea/
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:52PM (14 children)
Because someone on Twitter said it, it is now a movement?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:58PM (3 children)
Look, if you're a mighty buzzard, you ain't afraid of no strawman, like some lowly crow.
(Also that tweet, far from "chanting" seems to clearly state a coherent point, fairly prosaically for a tweet)
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:31PM (1 child)
Are we supposed to know who Ian Henry is?
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday September 12 2018, @08:29PM
What you mean you haven't heard of this person with 300 followers or their tweet with... 2 likes?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday September 13 2018, @01:41AM
Seems to me it spawned a pretty worthwhile and intelligent discussion. Were you looking for some other result?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:20PM (7 children)
It's been popular for a while to bring politics into open source thanks to the gnome foundation and then mozilla.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:03PM (6 children)
The GPL is exactly this kind of idea. "Do this, or no code for you." IMHO, it's done quite a bit to prevent commercial software from advancing as fast as it otherwise would have. For instance, at my companies, GPL'd code was never allowed to enter the codebase at all; the viral nature of the license was deemed toxic.
The end result was positive in that we ended up owning all our own IP, which was both valuable in a monetary sense and in that we, the people writing the code, ended up with valuable expertise in areas we otherwise would likely not have had; it was negative in that we had to re-invent the wheel (and the axle, and the tire, and the driveshaft, and the brakes, and...)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:37PM (5 children)
So... it's working exactly as intended?
Of course there's nothing wrong with using GPL in commercial code - there's plenty of commercial uses of GPL code (Red Hat for instance) you just can't keep your derivative code proprietary. And yeah, if you're not willing to pay the asking price for the existing codebase then you'll have to invent everything from scratch. Them's the breaks.
Contrast to proprietary code where, in general, you have no access to the source, and no option of making derivative products at all.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:03PM (4 children)
Of course it is. :)
FTFY. We did very well following this path. Our competitors, however, were unable to benefit from our work, which kept them from using our own efforts to cut our income. That's good when putting food on the table and keeping a roof overhead are priorities. Commercial use has different goals than OS goals. I've written both kinds of software; I'm well aware of the different benefits provided.
In point of fact, the software I give away now is only possible for me to create because during my working career the focus was completely on producing commercial products in a competitive space, a focus that resulted in considerable income and my present ability to do whatever the heck I want to.
No, not at all. We had 100% access to our proprietary code. It was our competitors that didn't have access to it. No only that, but I still own all that IP inasmuch as I either wrote it or paid for all of its development, and now it's being used to make free stuff for others. Isn't that great? :)
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
>We had 100% access to our proprietary code
Certainly. And you'd have 100% access to your own GPLed code - the GPL does nothing to limit your use of your own code. We're talking about using *other people's* code.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday September 12 2018, @07:37PM
It did nothing to limit the use of our code by our competitors, either, which made it straight-up toxic WRT food and shelter.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:22AM
Proprietary software is only better for owners. Perhaps you're an owner/coder, or perhaps the coder equivalent of an "uncle Tom"... too closely aligned with your corporate masters. If you're the latter, just realise they'd happily sack you and your coworkers before the next quarter and allow "your" codebase to rot if it made short-term financial "sense". For the rest of us : we're free to work for whichever employer pays the best, often on the same codebase - noone is holding our codebase hostage.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @11:30AM
could we have some details about what this amazing, mind-blowing code does?
some people are curious, what kind of super-portable, super-optimized, innovative algorithms the open-source world has lost, by being greedy communists who do not allow innovation from poor, huddled corporations?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:18PM
That's what the NYT would call "a small, but growing number".
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 14 2018, @12:25AM
Wellllll, yeah. He was sitting on his porcelain throne when he posted it!