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posted by chromas on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the No-sir,-I-don't-like-it dept.

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/


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:58PM (8 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:58PM (#733708)

    Wrong. If people can't use your software to build a puppy mulcher, it is not OSD compatible. Period, full stop. These issues were debated and settled decades ago.

    Yes if you know the naughty Elbonians are building a nuke you should act. Do you -really- think they are going to respect a license clause forbidding using your software for WMD production? Yeah, right. Drop a dime to the CIA, that is what you are already being taxed to fund as part of the National Defense. And if they ask you to help, unless it would endanger a lot of innocents, do it. Then when the Elbonians download your software, they will get a 'special edition' that will make the centrifuges fall over and all of their workstations get infected with a virus that makes them order a bunch of busty lesbian porn.

    The problem with putting field of use restrictions in is that no larger distribution can touch it. No two packages will have developers flogging the same hobby horse political ideology so any aggregated distribution would have the union set of all of the restrictions, probably with contradictory ones. Not only could no project, not even RedHat, hope to pay enough lawyers to wade through all of the licenses (most written poorly by non-lawyers) but the customers certainly couldn't hope to figure out if they can use it.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:11PM (6 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:11PM (#733718) Journal

    Wrong. If people can't use your software to build a puppy mulcher, it is not OSD compatible. Period, full stop. These issues were debated and settled decades ago.

    The argument isn't about what the OSD does or does not allow; the argument is whether or not the OSD is some kind of infallible moral compass.

    "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." This idea that one is no longer responsible for the effects of their actions as soon as there's one other person involved in the chain of command is precisely why our world is in the state it is in today. The NSA isn't trying to divorce their production from their politics. Nor is Google or Amazon or Microsoft. If we do, then we give them our code to use against us and we get nothing back in return.

    • (Score: 2) by insanumingenium on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:23PM

      by insanumingenium (4824) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:23PM (#733726) Journal

      Brother, you and I showed up to different arguments.

      If you think the best way of fixing evil is to put an exclusion on your open source license than that quote would appear to me to be a harsh condemnation of your stance.

      On the contrary, what is perfectly black and white clear is that open source itself is absolutely harmed by your useless and idiotic gesture.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:26PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:26PM (#733729)

      If we do, then we give them our code to use against us and we get nothing back in return.

      The fact that others do evil doesn't mean that we should do evil as well. And denying others their freedoms is, to me, evil. But maybe you don't care about software freedoms. If that is the case, then our goals are simply irreconcilable.

    • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:28PM (3 children)

      by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:28PM (#733732)

      Software is knowledge, and like science in general works best in the open. Even when governments do science and try to keep it secret, it always comes out in the end. If we couldn't even keep the atom bomb secrets for a decade, with the full intelligence community trying, nothing you write is staying out of "the wrong hands" because of a license clause. Yes science works for bad people too. If you can't deal with the trauma that your creations might be put to uses you don't approve of, you need to find another business to be in.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:05PM (2 children)

        by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:05PM (#733755) Journal

        ...and yet I still can't run a 20 year old game because the source code is locked away and even attempting to get it violates numerous national and international laws and treaties. Some software is like science; but most of it is art. It's not discovering anything new, and it's a product of the time, culture, and technology which created it. There's no reason to think that somebody else is going to perfectly recreate that same software in the future. More likely it will just be lost to time.

        Science works best in the open, but the same is not always true of art. Doing art in the open can be a great way to destroy the vision that the art was trying to represent in the first place. Of course, sometimes doing it in the open IS the vision, and that's great, but sometimes those two ideas are in conflict.

        • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:26PM (1 child)

          by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:26PM (#733770)

          And we are supposed to be the ones object to that bullshit, not adding new rules.

          And yeah, games and some art asset type titles aren't science. If we actually stayed within the limits of the Constitution it wouldn't be a terrible problem to allow copyrights for some software. We are now past the historically accepted limit of "perpetuity" with life of the author + 70 and Disney wants corporate copyrights extended past 99 years as well. A flat twenty year copyright would be workable. Even for Hollywood, if Return of the Jedi still hasn't "officially' broke even yet that is on them.

          • (Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:42PM

            by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:42PM (#733780) Journal

            Yes, we're supposed to OBJECT to that bullshit, not sit idly by and allow it to happen.

            Most open source advocates aren't the biggest fans of modern copyright law, yet they utilize those very laws in order to build the open source licenses. The GPL is only enforceable through copyright law, yet it's pretty much designed to turn copyright against itself. Personally, I think we should continue to explore this concept of using our opponents' tools against them, as the results so far have been pretty damn good.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:26PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:26PM (#733728) Journal

    all of their workstations get infected with a virus that makes them order a bunch of busty lesbian porn.

    Some might consider that not a bug, but a feature. Or so I read.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.