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part that gives me pause, even though I'm 100% okay with being against the current policy of separation: what next? Totally silly, but what if it comes out that

by jsgo 8y ago

part that gives me pause, even though I'm 100% okay with being against the current policy of separation: what next? Totally silly, but what if it comes out that some food company is engaging in behavior that is deemed immoral. Lerna then tacks that onto the next revision of itself. But I, myself, really like food company's product and don't feel the controversy is warranted. Then what? I understand the motivation with wanting to protest in the best way you can, but I think in this case, it is going to do more harm than good.

jancsika 8y ago
My point is that the license is the absolute worst place to put anything-- including a protest-- because licensing issues are way outside the expertise of most programmers. For example, if they put the same information in a comment in the code, then whatever flame war might ensue would at least be fully on the social implications of it. Nobody will worry about the comment accidentally getting interpreted improperly by various JS engines. Nobody will talk about how the big company they work for will not touch code that has certain comments because the comment department advised them those comments are radioactive. Troglodytes won't pop up to poorly recite what they think they read on the wall about comments and maximizing freedom. All of that and more will happen when you write anything non-standard in a license for a FLOSS project. It's a dog-whistle to every programmer out there who has dreamed of pretending to be a lawyer. I offer into evidence the ratio of ICE-related posts to licensing-desiderata-related posts in this thread. If you've really got so much energy to waste that your thinking about writing your own custom license blurb, just go reverse-engineer a baseband OS or something.
- jancsika 8y ago
  And now apparently the license has been reverted to MIT: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 Someone had very decent aims-- protesting ICE-- and executed it in the wrong scope-- a license change. If you read the comments on that issue you'll see at least one person takes that as a good lesson for avoiding the very decent aims in open source projects. That is unfortunate, and IMO a good reason to avoid mucking around with licenses at all.

by jsgo 8y ago

jancsika 8y ago

My point is that the license is the absolute worst place to put anything-- including a protest-- because licensing issues are way outside the expertise of most programmers. For example, if they put the same information in a comment in the code, then whatever flame war might ensue would at least be fully on the social implications of it. Nobody will worry about the comment accidentally getting interpreted improperly by various JS engines. Nobody will talk about how the big company they work for will not touch code that has certain comments because the comment department advised them those comments are radioactive. Troglodytes won't pop up to poorly recite what they think they read on the wall about comments and maximizing freedom. All of that and more will happen when you write anything non-standard in a license for a FLOSS project. It's a dog-whistle to every programmer out there who has dreamed of pretending to be a lawyer. I offer into evidence the ratio of ICE-related posts to licensing-desiderata-related posts in this thread. If you've really got so much energy to waste that your thinking about writing your own custom license blurb, just go reverse-engineer a baseband OS or something.

jancsika 8y ago
And now apparently the license has been reverted to MIT: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633 Someone had very decent aims-- protesting ICE-- and executed it in the wrong scope-- a license change. If you read the comments on that issue you'll see at least one person takes that as a good lesson for avoiding the very decent aims in open source projects. That is unfortunate, and IMO a good reason to avoid mucking around with licenses at all.