@joepie91 idk that sounds like a pain. I have a lot of users.
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@zkat @joepie91 I mean same, my position is "you will not receive support, you will not be accepted in the community, and your PRs will not be merged" (which turns out[1] to be incredibly controversial even though it's like the lowest bar imaginable)
I think the really important change here is cultural: to kick these people out of our shared communities. licenses are a distraction from that.
@zkat @joepie91 right now, half* the hacker circles are explicitly in favor of OSS being used by the MIC to the point where talks about Kubernetes on a [vehicle]** is considered normal or actively desirable. this is a problem! until we can change that norm, i don't think that enforcing it will result in any meaningful difference
* not literally half. a very significant amount
** there's apparently quite a few of these deployments. i think the talk i remembered was by SonarQube...
@whitequark @joepie91 this all feels like barely doing anything too, though. They can just maintain their own forks, pretty trivially, with their own patches. Something you could do even if you had the additional stumbling block of unfriendly licensing.
@zkat I think it does more than making a license that says "you can't use this" that they ignore unless you're going invest significant resources into finding and suing violations. unless we have some reason to think they'll actually respect the license terms when we see that they don't with GPL even?
@esoterra generally, a lot of big companies will have licensing restrictions and they'll actually be pretty compliant most of the time. There's a lot of tools these days for sussing out GPLs in your tree, too. People do care about it, and making it visible helps.
@whitequark @joepie91 I feel like there needs to be more active organizing around these values (see also: needing a movement) in order to really make an impact. I don't feel like you or I carving out our values in our individual spaces is nearly enough.
@zkat @joepie91 fundamentally I see two possible choices: either we make a world where open source (in any form) is still a viable concept, by force if necessary, or we retreat to the guild system where the knowledge is gatekept to a select cadre of trusted members
I know the latter to be effective but I'm far too invested in the concept of open knowledge to give the former up so easily
@zkat @joepie91 semi-related: i acquired fragments of a Russian Shahed-136 and reverse-engineered the CRPA and navigation units. i expected to find significant traces of OSS (which is why i started the project) but the only thing i found is the bootloader on an IMXRT1052 (grabbed from some random guy's github account) which performed no critical function
@jsbarretto @zkat @joepie91 it was the most obvious first step
@whitequark @joepie91 yeah. I just wanna see the movement get going right about now, too. I appreciate you going about the values at a project level either way, since that helps figure out what needs to be done.
@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.
RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115850458585426362
@whitequark I can see keeping freedom zero iff virality of licenses is strong enough that it becomes toxic to corporates (see quote below)
As far as using the weapon of the enemy? I think in this case, if we were to keep freedom zero, there is basically nothing to lose and everything to gain, if your intention is to build a commons. Simply putting stuff out there to have its value exploited by corporate interests has not actually been working very well at all for us. Like, literally, right now, it is bad and does not work. I'm open to some legal aikido when that's the only language the enemy will actually comply with.
@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.
@jaxter184 what are your thoughts on https://toot.cat/@zkat/115850458585426362 ?
@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 ?
@mehdi_benadel what do they picture this commons to be? Something that's truly a commons that everyone gets to share, or something that can be extracted from (aka not copyleft)?
@zkat Commons are the resources that we share, which are not the property of anyone in particular, and that we need to share ethically.
It kind of fits in a communalist vision of resources governance.
@mehdi_benadel @zkat We should also not ignore that in most societies, the act of having rights to the commons (i.e: being a 'commoner') is also a role that comes with obligations and responsibilities, along with an expectation of behaviour! Too often software communities traditionally focus on maximising 'freedom', forgetting that many freedoms enjoyed by one group can come at the expense of another group. It is important to promote pro-social norms and ostracise those that violate them!
@mehdi_benadel indeed. What specifically are these organizations in France trying to do that's different from just plain open source with MIT/BSD-likes, or free software a-la GPL?
@zkat It is true that I didn't hear about any initiatives around a more ethical licence. To be honest, I don't know if that's ultimately the right way of doing it (we've seen malicious use is not stopped by license with AI for instance), but if you want some resources, you can maybe discuss with people from Framasoft, April, Libre en Communs.
Cc @John_Livingston, would you have some leads on the subject of ethical licenses as Commons in France ?
