@erlend Fascinating thoughts - thank you. It had never occurred to me that in open source we've neglected the famous "paradox of tolerance" since the very beginning! https://conversational-leadership.net/tolerance-is-a-social-contract/

@erlend 🤦I actually thought this was about electricity and how to "open source" it 🤦

@erlend @moof thanks for writing this. I’ll have another crack at it while I’m working (as I can absolutely charge for this), but this approach really does help me make arguments against Microsoft Azure services which do not guarantee portability for our clients.

I am reticent to attack Microsoft so openly, but I see so many companies make mistakes with Purview and Dynanics because they’re already a Microsoft shop despite saying that open source is a guiding principle.

@erlend this more or less aligns with my thinking, but I would go further with it. I would suggest that public licenses are the problem, not merely indiscriminate ones. Because of you license it to "everyone except that one guy" that guy is on the honor system to respect your wishes. And we already don't trust that guy.

I think instead project governance should license to a common pool, which can then sublicense to specific people bring the pool, using basically the same mechanisms as proprietary projects. The pool can set conditions and negotiate terms, using access to the entire pool as leverage.

@erlend god damn, I didn't realize this needed to be said but you're right and you should say it!

@erlend Fabulous essay. My problem with the world is that licensing is only as strong as the legal system which underpins it, and Nazis do not respect incumbent legal systems.

Just look at how Microsoft raped Github to feed its AI: the most outrageous software Nazi act ever.

@erlend
Yeah "free" as in "nazi-free" would be a pretty great freedom for open source to have about now...

@erlend Queued for later reading.

@erlend “No one is coming down from up high to save us. We can only seize the levers of power that are within our reach. Licensing is a uniquely powerful lever because it is enacted as a bottom-up change at the level of individual agency whilst simultaneously being wielded with the top-down legal authority of nation states.”

@erlend the CLA one will definitely be interesting.

@erlend really excellent article!

@erlend This is a much necessary conversation. We know that this licensing purism comes from this anarchocapitalist maxim of “avoiding politics” which is in itself a political act.

We have plenty of historical evidence showing that, by not addressing reality as is, by overemphasizing the importance of an abstract hypothetical where software is not doing its maximum theoretical good, we’re letting it be unleashed for damage at scale.

@erlend @zkat this piece is tremendous.

@erlend this is such a good article.

I'm really happy to have stubbornly clung to licensing @conjured_ink's software under Parity 7.0 but I also agree that it's insufficient: the reason it works is largely because it scares of most of the undesirables by virtue of scaring off the Capitalists. Our answer to nazis and other horrible people using our software, though, is "we will literally not help you, we will shame you, and we will cook in landmines if we have to that you have to constantly patch out if you want to keep using our latest versions". Can't stop 'em completely but we can make it really annoying

@erlend thanks for publishing this

@erlend i'll speak on this specifically:

indiscriminate use is a relic of a time when technologists held an idealistic view of social and power dynamcis, when we thought that everyone could get along and we just needed more acceptance.

It turns out, though, that antisocial people exist.

Shoutout to fellow traveler and void-yeller @zkat

https://toot.cat/@zkat/115129958258018665