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The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to try to make whatever you don't like illegal. Which is getting more and more common. On college campuses i

by rsj_hn 5y ago

The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to try to make whatever you don't like illegal. Which is getting more and more common. On college campuses it's getting more common for kids to call the police when they see something that offends them, including speech that offends them. They just assume that they have a right to a higher government power to make illegal whatever is bad in the world. That is the knee jerk reaction here. The idea that software patterns can be made illegal is just absurd, and goes against the early vision of the free software movement which recognized the most important thing was the freedom to write software, rather than the freedom to get a job writing exactly the software you think you should be writing, and the right to throw employers in jail if they fire you for not doing what you're told on the job.

mjsir911 5y ago
> The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to try to make whatever you don't like illegal. The things I advocate the government to ban are things I believe are bad for society. I don't like ice-cream, but I don't advocate for an ice-cream ban because I don't believe ice-cream is tearing apart our society at the seams. Dark patterns are bad for society, and prey on people's miscalculations and inefficiencies of our chemical-brains. In the same way that child labour came up because it was profitable short term, but it was decided against that it was still a bad thing for society. The government's job is to steer society to a better place, god knows we'll take it down a bad path left unsupervised.
chriswarbo 5y ago
> The idea that software patterns can be made illegal is just absurd, and goes against the early vision of the free software movement The free software movement has never been about a libertarian, free-for-all, wild-west. In particular, it has always been about taking power away from developers, and giving it to users (e.g. see gnu.org/philosophy ). Whilst FSF, GNU, etc. don't advocate banning certain software (AFAIK), they're certainly not averse to government intervention for social good. GNU Taler is a good example: a cryptocurrency which offers anonymity to buyers, but sellers remain identifiable for tax collection. Also note that 'freedom 0' (freedom to run the software for any purpose) only requires that a license itself doesn't impose restrictions on users. It's taken for granted that users are already restricted by other mechanisms. For example, a license with a clause like "the software must not be used to commit bank fraud" would be non-free, but that doesn't imply that the free software movement approves of bank fraud; simply that (a) in places where bank fraud is illegal, such a clause is redundant, and (b) in places where bank fraud is legal, such a clause would constitute a developer exercising unjust power over users.

by rsj_hn 5y ago

mjsir911 5y ago

> The knee-jerk reaction is running to the government to try to make whatever you don't like illegal. The things I advocate the government to ban are things I believe are bad for society. I don't like ice-cream, but I don't advocate for an ice-cream ban because I don't believe ice-cream is tearing apart our society at the seams. Dark patterns are bad for society, and prey on people's miscalculations and inefficiencies of our chemical-brains. In the same way that child labour came up because it was profitable short term, but it was decided against that it was still a bad thing for society. The government's job is to steer society to a better place, god knows we'll take it down a bad path left unsupervised.

chriswarbo 5y ago

> The idea that software patterns can be made illegal is just absurd, and goes against the early vision of the free software movement The free software movement has never been about a libertarian, free-for-all, wild-west. In particular, it has always been about taking power away from developers, and giving it to users (e.g. see gnu.org/philosophy ). Whilst FSF, GNU, etc. don't advocate banning certain software (AFAIK), they're certainly not averse to government intervention for social good. GNU Taler is a good example: a cryptocurrency which offers anonymity to buyers, but sellers remain identifiable for tax collection. Also note that 'freedom 0' (freedom to run the software for any purpose) only requires that a license itself doesn't impose restrictions on users. It's taken for granted that users are already restricted by other mechanisms. For example, a license with a clause like "the software must not be used to commit bank fraud" would be non-free, but that doesn't imply that the free software movement approves of bank fraud; simply that (a) in places where bank fraud is illegal, such a clause is redundant, and (b) in places where bank fraud is legal, such a clause would constitute a developer exercising unjust power over users.