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