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>> I don’t lose sleep over Boeing patching a random library I wrote and not sharing the patch > What you call "permissive" then is only permissive in the short
by jamescostian 5y ago
>> I don’t lose sleep over Boeing patching a random library I wrote and not sharing the patch
> What you call "permissive" then is only permissive in the short term, because it precisely introduces this segmentation between users and developers in the long term. If you look at this as a tree structure, it's permissive only to your immediate children, because you are granting them the right to take away this precise freedom from your grandchildren, thus introducing the separation between users and developers.
It sounds like vsw02 understands your argument, and has already showed that they don't consider the scenario you describe to bothersome. One might say vsw02 predicted your argument, but I'd say you didn't fully consider vsw02's argument.
Your example sounds like the paradox of tolerance, but there is a critical difference: consequences. If you are tolerant of intolerance, then the repercussion is that intolerance continues, and even increases, which can also increase physical violence, and various human rights violations. If you give code freely to those who will not provide the modifications to that code freely, there won't be an increase in violence, or what most people would consider human rights violations.
Could we have a bit more FOSS code if all OSS was libre? Maybe. Carmack disagrees though in TFA, stating "I'm pretty sure there would have been more total users of the code, likely making the amount shared in the open still greater." Explaining libre isn't helping, you need to provide an argument that vsw02 hasn't already shown to be irrelevant to them, and ideally, one that also addresses Carmack's argument (saying "that's just speculation" is true, but it seems Carmack's speculation is speculation that a lot of us subjectively already agree with)
- vsw02 5y agoOf course I predicted it. It’s like talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door. The idea that you fully understand their entire belief structure, have done your homework on it out of respect (seriously, I have), and ultimately reject it anyway is puzzling to adherents of most belief systems, so they tend to revert to explaining it a different way out of a suspicion that you don’t get it. I’ve probably heard over a hundred different metaphors for why I should care about what my users do with my software at this point and it’s still a level of arrogance I’m not willing to introduce to my engineering. All I can say is oh well, I guess.
- ldarby 5y ago> they tend to revert to explaining it a different way out of a suspicion that you don’t get it. I think that's because, in my experience (outside of HN), many people really don't get it. They say something like "this proprietary software did something nasty again" without knowing that the GPL exists or that it's effectively impossible for GPL'ed software to do nasty things. Hence, it is always worth explaining the GPL and its values to them. It's not always easy to see when someone already understands the values and just disagrees with them.