5 ms·

The Anti-Capitalist Software License

14 points by LeoPanthera 6y ago

mmm_grayons 6y ago
Ideological contents aside: > does not exploit the labor of non-members This is not good legal terminology and so makes it a bad license. People who want to prevent monetization by a closed-source company are probably still better off with the AGPL.
- vmception 6y ago
  That statement is good enough legal terminology. What makes you say otherwise? They just didn't define members, which are clearly - to me - the people with membership interests in an Limited Company, along with the managing member. Or shareholders in a Corporation. I have no comment on the rest of the clauses so to anyone passing by, don't base any response to me as if I have an opinion.
  - tzs 6y ago
    It doesn't define "exploit the labor of non-members". What interactions with a non-member count as "exploiting" their labor?
    - kemotep 6y ago
      Does this requirement mean computer components that the software is written and deployed on needs to be "conflict free", and manufactured by other anti-capitalist firms? I don't know of anything that would meet that definition.
      - tzs 6y ago
        My guess is that what it is trying to cover is having employees who are paid an hourly wage or a salary only rather than being included in the profit sharing. If that is correct, there would be no restriction on them buying and using supplies from other organizations that do exploit labor.
  - mmm_grayons 6y ago
    That statement is good enough legal terminology. What makes you say otherwise? No definition of "exploit". That word means different things when read in a marxist, capitalist, or legal context, and probably different things in branches of each.
- henriquez 6y ago
  I came to post the same nit, in this context “members” is not defined. And taken at its extreme (assuming an intuitive definition), it could be argued that any organization “exploits” the labor of anyone else by participating in and benefiting from the economy as a whole, not to mention specific things like roads, schools, etc. This section needs to be clarified, as is the license is perilously unusable.
- badRNG 6y ago
  It does seem like it would be stronger if it simply stated that all employees must be equal owners.
0xy 6y ago
Forgive my naivety, but why aren't worker-owned cooperatives considered to be profitable enterprises? Taking an example of a typical factory making widgets, profit is essential so that the organization running the place has a buffer in case of unexpected breakdowns or room for expansion. This agreement appears to forbid worker-owned cooperatives, since profit is essential to the orderly operation of any factory. Without profit, there is no emergency fund and there is no preventative maintenance.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Presumably a worker-owned cooperative would fall under 2c and 3. >2c. An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members >3. If the User is an organization with owners, then all owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal share.
  - 0xy 6y ago
    If profit is shared, it's not profit the organization can use as a buffer. The organization itself requires profit. That profit cannot be distributed without putting continuity of the organization at risk.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      The wording is "seeks shared profit" which does not to me read as "distributes all profit." My read is "seeks shared financial gain" (in contrast to "seeks shareholder financial gain"). Even a non-profit institution is able to re-invest it's income without being a for-profit institution.
      - 0xy 6y ago
        What is the fundamental difference between a factory owned by a cooperative and a factory owned by a corporation with workers of the factory having shares in that company? The profit objectives are identical. They have to be, because the basic realities of factory processes mandate profit for ongoing operations and expansion. If that's true, then why is one excluded and not the other?
weeksie 6y ago
Any license with an ideological component is a timebomb that goes off when the developer decides you are no longer pure enough. You’d have to be insane to use any software with a license like this (if one was enforceable)
- duncan_bayne 6y ago
  > when the developer decides you are no longer pure enough Which will happen. Purity wars in ideological movements are nothing new (and far from limited to the political Left!). E.g. Orwell was shot during the Spanish Civil War, not by Fascists, but by a different bunch of Communists on whose side he was theoretically fighting. > You’d have to be insane Well, this is a Marxist thing, so that box comes pre-ticked.
- 0xy 6y ago
  It's often a joke among far-left communities that garden variety liberals are more contemptible than right-wing organizations, so I believe it. When you get to the fringes of political ideology, infighting and corruption tend to be insane. There's constant backstabbing (sometimes in a literal sense) at both extremes.
  - non-entity 6y ago
    yeah I have some ML friends I followed on social media and got a first hand look at so called leftist infighting. Seems mostly counterproductive.
wrnr 6y ago
I sometimes amuse myself with the idea of creating a software license out of spite for certain organisation, a kind of black list if you will, like Arya Starks kill list but more childish. At any rate you'd probably want to look into all the ways rich people make money with not-for-profits. The difference in intent and word of law is damn difficult problem to solve.
- non-entity 6y ago
  From my understanding simply using the AGPL is enough to have most corporations eschew you (somewhat /s I guess)
- aaron-santos 6y ago
  For all of the GitHub supporting ICE condemnation, I'm surprised there isn't a license which forbids GitHub from using a piece of software.
  - kazinator 6y ago
    How about something a bit different: a license that prevents Github hosting? That should be easy. You create two licenses for your software: a license for the code per se, and a separate one for your git repo of the software. So that is to say, for instance, your program could be MIT licensed. But your git repository (all the Git objects and meta-data: commit messages, hashes, branches, tags, ...) could have a more restrictive license which asserts "this may not be mirrored on Github". It's intriguing. If we regard the work you're creating to be your git repo, then that is not free. If we regard the work you're creating to be baselines of an artifact that you're committing to the git repo, then that is free.
kemotep 6y ago
This doesn't respect the 4 freedoms. If by some odd circumstance, all the FAANG companies became worker cooperatives and adopted all the requirements for this license and released new versions of their software using this license, would that really make the world a better place? I feel without the 4 software freedoms, like with the GPL, you are not respecting the freedoms of the end user. They mention requiring, "not exploiting non-members". To me that requires the 4 software freedoms. Is my understanding of this license and the software freedoms incorrect?
- Kednicma 6y ago
  If each FAANG released backend code: * Facebook: We'd learn what sorts of data collection and aggregation they do, and how metrics are planned and gamed. * Apple: We'd learn something about the App Store rejection policy, and we'd also get to jailbreak and repair our phones. * Amazon: We'd find out how their billing and egress policies really work. We'd also get to see how customers are tracked. * Netflix: Oh look, tracking of customers, something we'd learn. * Google: Customers, tracking, etc. But also they know stuff about their long-term hardware vendor partners. How would this not make the world a better place? It's clearly in line with both the copyleft programme of ending copyright protections on source code, and also more general anti-corporate and anti-surveillance ideologies.
  - kemotep 6y ago
    This license doesn't require them to share the source though, just limit who is allowed to use it. Is that reading of the license wrong, is my question. They specifically mention not caring if source code is shared but if the companies that utilize software licensed with this license are worker collectives or not. Which is why I feel it would be better to advocate for the [A]GPL as that would result in the situation you describe.
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      Google has a public AGPL policy [0], so advocating for it will not have the effect that you like. [0] https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/
duncan_bayne 6y ago
I'm about as pro-capitalist, laissez-faire, pro-free-market as it gets. I was a literal card-carrying member of the LibertariaNZ party back in New Zealand. The spirit of this license disgusts me at a fairly deep emotional level. That said, I think that this specific concern raised by the license is very real: > ... If you want your code to empower students, artists, hobbyists, collectives, cooperatives and nonprofits to survive under capitalism while not contributing free labor to corporations. I've seen a few cases where I think that open source authors and maintainers are getting it in the shorts. Yes there's value - "Egoboo", learning, personal promotion, etc. - but I don't think it's enough in many cases. For example: * Free software that contributes to the growth and dominance of proprietary, for-profit ecosystems. E.g. I was recently back on Windows for the first time in a decade or so professionally, building an app I'd written in Common Lisp. Scoop (for package management on Windows) and Rosewell (which now supports Windows) made this super easy and pleasant. But ... why would you spend your time writing Free software to benefit such an ecosystem? Unless you're being paid for it, why not spend your time contributing to a Free ecosystem instead? * Free software that is productised by cloud providers (e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-hits-back-at-open-source-software-critics/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-hits-back-at-open-source-s...). * Companies like Google, who are happy to build upon a plethora of open source products to generate billion-dollar profits, but who then turn around and actively give the middle finger to the communities without which they wouldn't exist (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/03/googles_widevine_drm/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/03/googles_widevine_drm/).
- Kednicma 6y ago
  I think it's hilarious that you're disgusted. How awful would it be if, when you purchased a computer, you were entitled to all of the code that comes with the computer, and full documentation and toolchains? How much worse would your life really get? Edit: Please, use your words and not your downvote. Your downvotes just mean that you agree with me: Your disgust is an ironic expression of a crab mentality where you regret that other people might be able to have nice things due to us working together as a society.
  - duncan_bayne 6y ago
drivingmenuts 6y ago
First, you have to have software worth licensing, that is complicated enough to be too much trouble to be re-written.
_delirium 6y ago
This seems related to the copyfarleft concept proposed by Dmytri Kleiner [1] and his Peer Production License as a first-draft implementation of the concept. That's spawned a few license variants and been debated a bit [2]. Would be interesting to know whether the authors of this license are aware of those licenses and debate, and how they see their goals as relating. [1] http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/ http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/ [2] E.g., https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-critique https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-crit..., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2468731 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2468731,
neckardt 6y ago
> An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members It doesn't make indication of the distribution of the profit. If I were a business owner couldn't I get around this by giving each employee $1 in stock options? If the value of the organization goes up there's still shared profit, no matter how minuscule it is.

14 points by LeoPanthera 6y ago

Ideological contents aside: > does not exploit the labor of non-members This is not good legal terminology and so makes it a bad license. People who want to prevent monetization by a closed-source company are probably still better off with the AGPL.

vmception 6y ago
That statement is good enough legal terminology. What makes you say otherwise? They just didn't define members, which are clearly - to me - the people with membership interests in an Limited Company, along with the managing member. Or shareholders in a Corporation. I have no comment on the rest of the clauses so to anyone passing by, don't base any response to me as if I have an opinion.
- tzs 6y ago
  It doesn't define "exploit the labor of non-members". What interactions with a non-member count as "exploiting" their labor?
  - kemotep 6y ago
    Does this requirement mean computer components that the software is written and deployed on needs to be "conflict free", and manufactured by other anti-capitalist firms? I don't know of anything that would meet that definition.
    - tzs 6y ago
      My guess is that what it is trying to cover is having employees who are paid an hourly wage or a salary only rather than being included in the profit sharing. If that is correct, there would be no restriction on them buying and using supplies from other organizations that do exploit labor.
- mmm_grayons 6y ago
  That statement is good enough legal terminology. What makes you say otherwise? No definition of "exploit". That word means different things when read in a marxist, capitalist, or legal context, and probably different things in branches of each.
henriquez 6y ago
I came to post the same nit, in this context “members” is not defined. And taken at its extreme (assuming an intuitive definition), it could be argued that any organization “exploits” the labor of anyone else by participating in and benefiting from the economy as a whole, not to mention specific things like roads, schools, etc. This section needs to be clarified, as is the license is perilously unusable.
badRNG 6y ago
It does seem like it would be stronger if it simply stated that all employees must be equal owners.

0xy 6y ago

Forgive my naivety, but why aren't worker-owned cooperatives considered to be profitable enterprises? Taking an example of a typical factory making widgets, profit is essential so that the organization running the place has a buffer in case of unexpected breakdowns or room for expansion. This agreement appears to forbid worker-owned cooperatives, since profit is essential to the orderly operation of any factory. Without profit, there is no emergency fund and there is no preventative maintenance.

marcinzm 6y ago
Presumably a worker-owned cooperative would fall under 2c and 3. >2c. An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members >3. If the User is an organization with owners, then all owners are workers and all workers are owners with equal share.
- 0xy 6y ago
  If profit is shared, it's not profit the organization can use as a buffer. The organization itself requires profit. That profit cannot be distributed without putting continuity of the organization at risk.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    The wording is "seeks shared profit" which does not to me read as "distributes all profit." My read is "seeks shared financial gain" (in contrast to "seeks shareholder financial gain"). Even a non-profit institution is able to re-invest it's income without being a for-profit institution.
    - 0xy 6y ago
      What is the fundamental difference between a factory owned by a cooperative and a factory owned by a corporation with workers of the factory having shares in that company? The profit objectives are identical. They have to be, because the basic realities of factory processes mandate profit for ongoing operations and expansion. If that's true, then why is one excluded and not the other?

weeksie 6y ago

Any license with an ideological component is a timebomb that goes off when the developer decides you are no longer pure enough. You’d have to be insane to use any software with a license like this (if one was enforceable)

duncan_bayne 6y ago
> when the developer decides you are no longer pure enough Which will happen. Purity wars in ideological movements are nothing new (and far from limited to the political Left!). E.g. Orwell was shot during the Spanish Civil War, not by Fascists, but by a different bunch of Communists on whose side he was theoretically fighting. > You’d have to be insane Well, this is a Marxist thing, so that box comes pre-ticked.
0xy 6y ago
It's often a joke among far-left communities that garden variety liberals are more contemptible than right-wing organizations, so I believe it. When you get to the fringes of political ideology, infighting and corruption tend to be insane. There's constant backstabbing (sometimes in a literal sense) at both extremes.
- non-entity 6y ago
  yeah I have some ML friends I followed on social media and got a first hand look at so called leftist infighting. Seems mostly counterproductive.

wrnr 6y ago

I sometimes amuse myself with the idea of creating a software license out of spite for certain organisation, a kind of black list if you will, like Arya Starks kill list but more childish. At any rate you'd probably want to look into all the ways rich people make money with not-for-profits. The difference in intent and word of law is damn difficult problem to solve.

non-entity 6y ago
From my understanding simply using the AGPL is enough to have most corporations eschew you (somewhat /s I guess)
aaron-santos 6y ago
For all of the GitHub supporting ICE condemnation, I'm surprised there isn't a license which forbids GitHub from using a piece of software.
- kazinator 6y ago
  How about something a bit different: a license that prevents Github hosting? That should be easy. You create two licenses for your software: a license for the code per se, and a separate one for your git repo of the software. So that is to say, for instance, your program could be MIT licensed. But your git repository (all the Git objects and meta-data: commit messages, hashes, branches, tags, ...) could have a more restrictive license which asserts "this may not be mirrored on Github". It's intriguing. If we regard the work you're creating to be your git repo, then that is not free. If we regard the work you're creating to be baselines of an artifact that you're committing to the git repo, then that is free.

kemotep 6y ago

This doesn't respect the 4 freedoms. If by some odd circumstance, all the FAANG companies became worker cooperatives and adopted all the requirements for this license and released new versions of their software using this license, would that really make the world a better place? I feel without the 4 software freedoms, like with the GPL, you are not respecting the freedoms of the end user. They mention requiring, "not exploiting non-members". To me that requires the 4 software freedoms. Is my understanding of this license and the software freedoms incorrect?

Kednicma 6y ago
If each FAANG released backend code: * Facebook: We'd learn what sorts of data collection and aggregation they do, and how metrics are planned and gamed. * Apple: We'd learn something about the App Store rejection policy, and we'd also get to jailbreak and repair our phones. * Amazon: We'd find out how their billing and egress policies really work. We'd also get to see how customers are tracked. * Netflix: Oh look, tracking of customers, something we'd learn. * Google: Customers, tracking, etc. But also they know stuff about their long-term hardware vendor partners. How would this not make the world a better place? It's clearly in line with both the copyleft programme of ending copyright protections on source code, and also more general anti-corporate and anti-surveillance ideologies.
- kemotep 6y ago
  This license doesn't require them to share the source though, just limit who is allowed to use it. Is that reading of the license wrong, is my question. They specifically mention not caring if source code is shared but if the companies that utilize software licensed with this license are worker collectives or not. Which is why I feel it would be better to advocate for the [A]GPL as that would result in the situation you describe.
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    Google has a public AGPL policy [0], so advocating for it will not have the effect that you like. [0] https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/ https://opensource.google/docs/using/agpl-policy/

duncan_bayne 6y ago

I'm about as pro-capitalist, laissez-faire, pro-free-market as it gets. I was a literal card-carrying member of the LibertariaNZ party back in New Zealand. The spirit of this license disgusts me at a fairly deep emotional level. That said, I think that this specific concern raised by the license is very real: > ... If you want your code to empower students, artists, hobbyists, collectives, cooperatives and nonprofits to survive under capitalism while not contributing free labor to corporations. I've seen a few cases where I think that open source authors and maintainers are getting it in the shorts. Yes there's value - "Egoboo", learning, personal promotion, etc. - but I don't think it's enough in many cases. For example: * Free software that contributes to the growth and dominance of proprietary, for-profit ecosystems. E.g. I was recently back on Windows for the first time in a decade or so professionally, building an app I'd written in Common Lisp. Scoop (for package management on Windows) and Rosewell (which now supports Windows) made this super easy and pleasant. But ... why would you spend your time writing Free software to benefit such an ecosystem? Unless you're being paid for it, why not spend your time contributing to a Free ecosystem instead? * Free software that is productised by cloud providers (e.g. https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-hits-back-at-open-source-software-critics/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-hits-back-at-open-source-s...). * Companies like Google, who are happy to build upon a plethora of open source products to generate billion-dollar profits, but who then turn around and actively give the middle finger to the communities without which they wouldn't exist (e.g. https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/03/googles_widevine_drm/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/04/03/googles_widevine_drm/).

Kednicma 6y ago
I think it's hilarious that you're disgusted. How awful would it be if, when you purchased a computer, you were entitled to all of the code that comes with the computer, and full documentation and toolchains? How much worse would your life really get? Edit: Please, use your words and not your downvote. Your downvotes just mean that you agree with me: Your disgust is an ironic expression of a crab mentality where you regret that other people might be able to have nice things due to us working together as a society.
- duncan_bayne 6y ago

drivingmenuts 6y ago

First, you have to have software worth licensing, that is complicated enough to be too much trouble to be re-written.

_delirium 6y ago

This seems related to the copyfarleft concept proposed by Dmytri Kleiner [1] and his Peer Production License as a first-draft implementation of the concept. That's spawned a few license variants and been debated a bit [2]. Would be interesting to know whether the authors of this license are aware of those licenses and debate, and how they see their goals as relating. [1] http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/ http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/ [2] E.g., https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-critique https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/copyfarleft-crit..., https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2468731 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2468731,

neckardt 6y ago

> An organization of people that seeks shared profit for all its members and does not exploit the labor of non-members It doesn't make indication of the distribution of the profit. If I were a business owner couldn't I get around this by giving each employee $1 in stock options? If the value of the organization goes up there's still shared profit, no matter how minuscule it is.