Discussion

@zkat My main concern with removing freedom zero has less to do with discrimination, and more with the swiss-cheese problem you get in licensing restrictions, once dependencies get involved - as your dependency tree grows, it's going to pull in more and more different licenses, all of which may introduce different restrictions, many of them likely to be vague enough that they 'overcatch'.

So in the end you'd likely end up with a very narrow set of actual allowed usecases, with different usecases being ruled out by different dependencies in the tree. This creates a direct incentive against adding dependencies, which I'd argue goes against the idea of building up a collective public commons, as it gets more difficult with every step.

How would you address that?

@zkat I've long felt that, just like we have a plethora of standard licenses to pick from, we should also have more named and documented governance models, because these two are separate dimensions that tell you something about the "openness" of a project.

You can be closed source but with community (led or involved) governance, you can be (corporate) open source without any community involvement at all, and many shades between. This wouldn't be captured in the license, but in some kind of governance contract with the community.

@zkat have you read https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-freedom-to-run.en.html :P

@zkat This is good. This is the right kind of thing to do, and the right direction to take it. But I continue to think that licenses are the wrong tool, and the four freedoms are the wrong starting point.

I would start with ideas like the right to repair and the right to (not) associate.

@zkat My initial thought is that a freedom has to be universal. If the issue is capitalistic greed and overreach, and the goal is regulation or restitution/recontribution, we have other societal levers we can (and should) pull for that.

@zkat @thephd I’m not sure whether it’s the same thing, but it certainly seems within the same ballpark, but have you looked into Ethical Source? https://ethicalsource.dev

@zkat Could you elaborate a bit on why it is bad when commercial entities use community software? I can think of reasons, but I'm interested in your reasons.

@zkat the problem with "non-commercial" licenses is everyone has a different definition, and the broadest, most restrictive interpretation usually does not overlap with anyone's actual intent. it always leads to surprises when people actually read the license. mostly what happens in practice is people either avoid NC stuff on principle because it limits the use of their own project too much, or the use it anyway and often end up out of compliance on accident

@zkat One question I have is: How are we defining (non-)commercial usage, and how is it scoped?

Example: a community group/charity does some commercial activity to generate funds for its main objectives.

Should the NC restriction forbid the entire org from using the work, or just for the actual commercial activities directly?

Or is is about the profit-making stance at the org level?

@zkat liberationware – free software without the Californian ideology, yes please.

@zkat I've been thinking along those lines as well, not as carefully or as deeply, to be sure, but one of the pieces that got me down that road is that there's no way with AGPLv3 to express the constraint that "if you scrape this work for AI training, copyright can't stop you, but you lose the benefits of the license." That feels like it points to a pretty fundamental limitation with the intellectual framing of *GPL licenses — Freedom Zero was a mistake, as you say.

@zkat I've been thinking a lot about how to revive copyleft, without the poisoned entanglement of FSF. It's a difficult balance, especially whether to have freedom-zero or not, but I think it's important to put it in the context of today's power dynamic: commercial interests are 10 orders of magnitude richer and more powerful than us.

When the copyleft "community" makes a large body of useful software, the license restrictions are an equalizer. This worked up until TiVo, basically.

@zkat I have also had a lot of similar thoughts of late. The intellectual commons is under attack and it ought not to be surprising that people that contribute to it also act to preserve it for future generations. Defensive licensing seems like a good first step on this road.

@zkat i am opposed to getting rid of freedom zero enough to personally commit to reimplementing anything i see under such a license under my usual choice of 0BSD.

i do not think you can build a functioning labor movement on top of Cop Stuff. and licenses are Cop Stuff. these are the tools of the enemy.

@zkat I agree that there is a problem of exploitation that's bad for the health of the FOSS ecosystem, but I'm not sure getting rid of freedom zero is the way to do it.

A worrying recent example from open source hardware is that Prusa proposed a new license that basically doesn't allow commercial use. Their target is to prevent companies in Shenzhen from undercutting them, but in doing so, they would also prevent people from selling parts for repair or selling improvements to existing designs, which is a hugely important part of what got 3D printing to where it is today. IMO, if this license catches on, the 3D printing community is going to collapse and it'll just be corporations in the space.

While there's definitely a need to change the structures and tools we use to defend against corporate capture, I worry your proposed solution could backfire, especially if the solution entails disallowing specific uses in the license, since that's one area where corporate trends move too quickly (notably, how short-lived the NFT trend was, and how quickly AI became the "next big thing").

My other concern is enforceability, i.e. writing an actually valid legal document and setting precedent in courts, but that seems like a solvable problem.

@zkat i used to like the term "public good" but i think most definitions of it (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good ) still have a lot of propertarian (thus exploitable) baggage. software isn't just information obviously, it performs functions, and very different consequences flow from who is able to access those functions. so "common" is still probably a better fit and i appreciate your ideas and reasoning here.

@zkat we have several open source organizations in France around the idea of the Commons. Would that fit your idea of another vision of open source ?