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: 5, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @03:56PM (6 children)
If you write the software yourself from scratch, of course you can license it as you like, but if you have this sort of restriction then it is not Free or Open software at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:12PM
This. What a strange article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:15PM (4 children)
Would BSD/MIT/Apache style licenses (open source, free as in beer) allow for such restrictions?
Seems GPL (free as in freedom software) would behave the way you describe, so perhaps this is another good thing about the GPL and its "viral" nature.
Ultimately it is up to the citizens of a democratic government to reign it in. Playing stupid licensing games won't do anything. If Americans, for example, don't like the imperialist and police state nature of the D and R teams, then they must vote for other parties, such as the Libertarians and Greens. Staying home and not voting is not a protest. It's lazy, apathetic silence. All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to sit at home on election day and kvetch about "two party system!"
(Score: 3, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:37PM (1 child)
Nope, none of the projects operating under BSD derived licenses would accept encumbered code like that. Hell, most consider the GPL too restrictive and replace any GPL code they can with BSD licensed versions.
(Score: 2) by bryan on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:27PM
The BSD 3-Clause No Nuclear License [spdx.org] has caused this issue in the past. The offending line quoted here:
This license does not fit the Free Software [gnu.org] definition because it violates Freedom 0 (The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.)
This license does not fit the Open Source [opensource.org] definition because it violates criteria 6 (No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor.)
However, this type of license is still referred to as "BSD" and thus causes all sorts of grief.
(Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 12 2018, @04:50PM
I think it's not really about the license, it's about the descriptors.
If you discriminate, it is no longer "open source" or "free software" by definition. You can add such terms to another license if you wish, that's not really the issue, it's just that the license then ceases to be something which you can legitimately describe in those terms.
So it's not that you need a new license; what you need is a new way to categorize such licenses. Call it "visible source" perhaps -- anyone can view the code, but it's not fully open. Not that such linguistic games really matter in the end...
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Wednesday September 12 2018, @06:02PM
I think this is what confuses some people, because it depends on what you mean by 'allow' for.
BSD license does 'allow' you to take the code and do whatever you want with it, including closing it. So yes, in a sense, it allows for it.
However, once you do that, your fork is no longer BSD licensed, no longer Free or even open.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?