@zkat I've seen this pop up in various forms (eg during FOSDEM 2020, I think it was https://archive.fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/legal_organizers_panel/), but always fail because not allowing to run for any purpose means that the license (or, worse, author) picks what is OK to use it for, and no big enough chunk of the ecosystem agrees on what is OK.
Put commercial use or any concrete business in it, and you lose anyone who gets paid for their work on FLOSS. Put in any ethical criterion, and you'd need millennia of philosophy to conclude.
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@zkat I appreciate the intent behind this because the free software project I dedicated most of my life (MediaWiki) to is actively used by the CIA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia) to do bad and illegal things. But I've yet to see someone provide an anti-MIC licensing provision that practically works in today's world where everything is unfortunately tied up in MIC. I am not sure if it's even possible to exist in modern (Western) society without being complicit in some kind of war crime.
@zkat anyways, I agree with @whitequark that copyright/contracts are not good or effective ways to solve these problems which are much larger social issues (and trying to do so can easily backfire, e.g. an anti-Taliban provision being weaponized to prevent access to humanitarian aid)
@legoktm @zkat @whitequark licenses basically only stop users with sophisticated compliance departments, and many of the worst users either (1) have no compliance departments (stalkers, cops) or (2) have such sophisticated compliance departments that they will spend a lot of time and money to find loopholes (FAANG).
Which isn't to say licenses are bad (they can be a useful piece of a bigger strategy) but their impact is limited by nature.
@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.
@whitequark @zkat I really don't like the idea that arbitrary arseholes can take the stuff that I release and use it for Bad Things, so in that sense I don't like freedom zero.
However, I don't see that there's much traction in using the nominal powers of copyright licensing against those particular arseholes, because they've got much larger weapons than I have.
So I'll keep licensing most of my stuff under BSD, and try to support other ways of limiting the powers of the arseholes.
@darkling @zkat i think that creating systems centered around control (in particular absolute and transferable control, as is the case for copyright) are inherently corrupting both to those wielding the control (who can be swayed by money or politics to do various things that are worse than the harms you're trying to prevent), and to the system as a whole (which becomes more and more centered on its ability to exert said control to the exclusion of individual members having meaningful say in it)
@darkling @zkat if i release my stuff with Freedom Zero, it means that i'm not living under the risk of (e.g.) OFAC knocking on my door telling me to apply sanctions on whoever's the enemy of the week. yes, i also give up the ability to pursuit _my_ enemy of the week. but that is the tradeoff i'm making to contribute to the commons
@darkling @zkat this actually brings me to the other consequence of asserting our control over work products [in a hypothetical situation where it works well]: it results in splitting of the community along faction lines to a much greater degree than any kind of cultural agreement
if i want my code to be used by some entities that you consider unacceptable, i can't use your software as a dependency. so even if we broadly agree on our goals, we can't work together as a result of pursuing them
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 ?
