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I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available, but under a license that doesn't comply with the DFSG. (And

I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available, but under a license that doesn't comply with the DFSG. (And yes, such software should be called something other than "open source".) Those guidelines aren't sacred, and neither is Stallman's definition of free software. Ever since I read _Hackers_ by Steven Levy a few years ago, I've been much less sympathetic toward Stallman, and the MIT AI Lab hackers in general. If you've read _Hackers_, recall that Stallman also strenuously opposed passwords. Well, it's absolutely clear now that restricting access to computers with passwords (or something equivalent) is absolutely necessary to defend against bad actors. So we should be open to the possibility that, while widespread sharing of source code is good, some kind of restriction on the usage of that code is necessary to protect the developers from freeloaders. I'm sure we haven't arrived at the best way to do this yet, but we won't get there if we immediately reject all attempts because they don't meet a definition of freedom that's perhaps too absolute for the real world.

oliwarner 5y ago
Seems like a strange attack against (eg) GPL. Stallman is completely odd, but GPL's aim has nothing to do with developers and everything to do with users: Let users know and control the software they're running on their computers. This is a real world issue, even if you don't think you need it. This does have varied ramifications for developers, but all designed to prevent a downstream removing rights for a user to access the code running. And that's great, irrespective of your or my views on the chap who instigated it all.
alexvoda 5y ago
The way I see it, Stallman is an end user freedom maximalist with end user roughly meaning person sitting in front of a computer using software. Thinking like this, any obstacle blocking a user from complete control of the computation on the computer is evil. This of course completely disregards the notion of computers having owners. Unfortunately, we are currently way way in the other direction, with owners being deprived of control over owned devices by manufacturers and vendors.
ralmidani 5y ago
The problem with absolutism: it ignores how trivial it is to copy and deploy a lot of modern programs. Condemning licenses which protect against juggernauts like Amazon leaves no middle ground between free software and proprietary software.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  Purely for practical reasons, I tend strongly toward using FOSS in all companies I've worked for. Ideology aside, if the authors go out of business or drop support, I can still support it myself (or pay someone too). From that position, I don't see a lot of middle ground between FOSS and proprietary: either it's FOSS or it's not. I don't mean that harshly, and it's not as though I flat-out wouldn't use proprietary software. I certainly wouldn't judge others who do. It's just that I see non-FOSS software as a significant risk that has to be mitigated, perhaps by limiting its use to cases where it'd be inconvenient if it went away, as opposed to a company-ending event. I don't think that absolutism, which for me carries a connotation of purity or dogma. For me, it's a pragmatic choice. For me, software using this license doesn't have an advantage over other proprietary licenses. I view it as regular, commercial software with an trial discount. Which is OK! That doesn't make it bad!
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    > Ideology aside, if the authors go out of business or drop support, I can still support it myself (or pay someone too). If I'm not mistaken, the intention with newer licenses such as this is that developers still release the source; they're just not allowing unrestricted free use. So if they go out of business or drop support for that code, user can still continue maintaining it, at least privately. Meanwhile, the fact that the authors are getting directly compensated for the software makes it less likely that they'll go out of business or drop support. The availability of source makes a big difference, doesn't it?
    - kstrauser 5y ago
      > The availability of source makes a big difference, doesn't it? It helps a lot, but it's not sufficient by itself. Am I still allowed to use the software if the company goes away? Can I distribute it to my customers? Can I deploy it on servers it's not already deployed to? With FOSS, the answers are clear. Some commercial software also has clauses like "if we cease to exist, your license reverts to the terms of the MIT license" or such.
open-source-ux 5y ago
"I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available" I agree. The label 'source only' is considered a dirty word among some open source advocates. But if you are building a B2B (Business-to-Business) software product, 'source only' is a perfectly viable option to succesfully make a living from your product - one that isn't completely closed source (but one that clearly isn't open source). The source code of the product cannot be shared, but it can be modified by the customer to suit their needs. The idea of 'source only' is not new at all. Back in the late 90s when Delphi was popular, many developers created and sold components to other developers (e.g. UI widgets). These components came with full source code of the components but they were not open source. Fast forward to today, what are examples of 'source only' products doing well? Two examples: 'Kirby CMS' and 'Craft CMS' (Content Management Systems). Both are popular and profitable. Their source code is even published publicly on GitHub. The product creators trust customers will pay for the product (presumably some do not, but enough customers do pay so it doesn't matter). Other developers are happy to contribute to the eco-system of plugins. So, yes, it's perfectly possible to build a community of enthusiastic followers for a 'source only' product that isn't open source. WordPress is another example. Although WordPress is open source, the plugin market is full of 'source only' plugins for sale that are successful and profitable.
- liuliu 5y ago
  Source-only / source-available is great way to make a living. It also makes whoever purchases your software life easier. But pretending to be open-source and accepting contributions from people who mistaken your project as open-source is problematic. Or, in another word, changing your license from open-source to something else because open-source made it popular in the first place is problematic too.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    Sure, bait and switch is bad. I wasn't defending that.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    In most cases - source available is _de facto_ open-source. You have two limitations on a product: - "actual physical limitations": the fact that you have the source, and that it's not a brutally-difficult life/career-consuming endeavor to edit it. - "artificial legal limitations": what the license says you can do Typically the capabilities afforded by the latter are a strict subset of the former (legal freedom to modify is useless without the practical freedom afforded by the actual source — I could release something with the full rights afforded by an open-source license, but if I fail to actually upload my code, even if you're legally free to edit the binary, it's a mostly useless freedom). At the same time, it's very common for the legal limitations to be utterly irrelevant, whether it's a case of you simply breaking a law that's not relevant to you (perhaps from another economic sphere of the world, or maybe you're just poor — or something is abandonware and there's nobody to even pay, not even a publisher). In all of these cases only the physical limitation dictates what you're able to do. -- If someone makes a freeware game, and it's abandonware — but it's source available, people can patch it so it keeps running on modern computers. They can translate it to other languages People can even fix egregious bugs. They can analyze it, and tease out internal mechanics and secrets, and document them on a wiki. If it's source-unavailable, then they're basically screwed. Far from being hypothetical, what I'm describing is more or less how the entire rom-hacking community works — thousands of games have undergone this, where they've received unofficial translations, balance and bug fixes, etc. (I have at least a couple of personal favorites, where I had an RPG with certain abilities that infamously did nothing in the release copy, even though they supposedly applied buffs to your heroes. In a modded version, that bug was fixed and they fully worked as intended.) All of this is possible in the modding scene because this stuff existed in a state where something "awfully close to" the platform's source code was available in a non-obfuscated, direct form. It's all illegal. All of it. That entire scene can't exist, legally, and survives on this wonderful, cockroach-like survivorship mentality of simply not caring that it's illegal, dodging lawsuits, and trading copies of things in defiance of takedown requests — which in turn happen so incredibly rarely that it may as well, practically, be legal. -- Unix, for another great example, basically exists because "actual physical limitations" didn't restrict it — the devs made the source available, tons of people copied it in what was probably a rather illegal/gray-area way, and sure, some people kicked up all sorts of legal fuss about it (c.f. some famous lawsuits involving SCO group), but in practice the only thing that matters was the fact that it had illegally achieved ubiquity. At that point the genie could no longer be put back in the bottle.
ForHackernews 5y ago
> some kind of restriction on the usage of that code is necessary to protect the developers from freeloaders That's exactly the point of the (A)GPL! It prevents freeloading because you have to release your contributions back to the community. The developers on this site just hate the GPL because the lawyers at their company won't let them use those libraries.
- trasz 5y ago
  Are you claiming those lawyers are pulling problems out of their [..], or do you accept that there might be very real reasons for embargoing GPL, especially with many lawyers from many companies doing that?
  - ForHackernews 5y ago
    I'm saying there's already a very obvious, decades-old established solution to the problem the parent commenter is raising. It's just an unpopular solution with devs on this board, because they actually want to be able to keep ~~freeloading~~ er, re-using community contributions at their well-paid jobs.
- HexDecOctBin 5y ago
  AGPL didn't serve MongoDB well, leading to SSPL.
kemitchell 5y ago
I remember a time when just about everybody in my world who laid hands on _Hackers_ loved it. So did I. Having reread it more recently, much later in my career, I was not no smitten.
- nuclearnice3 5y ago
  Would you care to provide some of the reasons for either opinion? (Or both!)
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    This post exposes some problems with what Levy called the "hacker ethic": https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.h...
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      That post is a word salad of unsubstantiated vague name-calling. > In the most intuitive case, the fact that the maker of a product, service, or program needs to recoup costs or earn fair compensation becomes irrelevant, if not overtly despised. The classic "Open source will never be popular, because people have to get paid" argument. > Software people, and their progress, über alles. ... Utopian communalism on the supply side, among programmers So free software developers are literally Commie-Nazis? Got it. > Often these strike a borderline millenialist, free-in-the-promised-land tone. Oh, and religious extremists too, I see. > The usual rules about permission, compensation, respect, and so on don’t apply, insofar as they’d apply to those making software. Also, people who use free software are all thieves and pirates, apparently.
JoshTriplett 5y ago
> I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available, but under a license that doesn't comply with the DFSG. Hard no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) Once that line is relaxed, even slightly, more licenses like this will start showing up and running battering rams against all the other parts of that line that prove inconvenient compared to proprietary licenses. This license is proprietary. I don't care if there's source or not, it's still proprietary. It does not serve the interests of Open Source to compromise on its nature to obtain somewhat more quantity of a far lesser thing. The unusual foibles and preferences of specific people who are firmly in the history of FOSS are not relevant factors here. The relevant factor is drawing and maintaining a strict definitional line, because if we let that line become even slightly porous, it won't hold up to the resulting assault that would invite. > some kind of restriction on the usage of that code is necessary to protect the developers from freeloaders Absolutely. For instance, requirements that others share changes they make under the same license. There's been a massive push in recent decades towards permissive licenses, driven in large part by a combination of companies who find permissive licensing convenient and individual developers who project a certain counter-counterculture "do whatever you want, I don't want to think about licenses". We're now seeing the net result of that: many large companies actually using those permissive licenses as written, and not necessarily the ethos behind them.
- HexDecOctBin 5y ago
  MongoDB was licensed under AGPL – not a permissive license – when AWS started free loading on them. Copyleft licenses have shown themselves to be no panacea when it comes to exploitation from the multi-billion-dollar companies. If Free Software can't feed its developers, they will look for food elsewhere.
  - JoshTriplett 5y ago
    Copyleft licenses are an improvement. They do not universally force payment in every case where a proprietary license could, but on the other hand, would MongoDB have become as popular in the first place if it wasn't FOSS? (And I object to the concept that hosting FOSS as a service is "freeloading". FOSS has always and only ever asked for giving back code, not money. Freeloading would be refusing to give back code, and companies regularly do fail on that front as well.) > If Free Software can't feed its developers, they will look for food elsewhere. FOSS can feed developers quite well. Some developers are deciding they'd prefer to sell proprietary software because they resent other companies benefiting from their work, and they're welcome to do that. What's not welcome is trying to claim the popularity benefits of FOSS without actually being FOSS; it is a good thing on balance that such efforts have met with chilly receptions. There are many, many conversations going on about additional ways to fund FOSS development. The ones that have a hope of succeeding aren't the ones that start by abandoning FOSS.
bradleyjg 5y ago
Many of the most useful open source projects are corporate driven. The only thing holding those companies to the usual set of licenses and provisions rather than something that would be much less open is the Schelling fence of the “open source” definition. Throw the door open to a thousand different idiosyncratic licenses and they too will abandon Apache, BSD, and MIT.
- HexDecOctBin 5y ago
  The reasons corporations lead open source projects is to undercut their (potential) competitors by commoditising their complements. OSI licenses are used in such projects because they allow the businesses to achieve the above. Open-source has started to become a weapons in the arsenal of Goliath against the David who may want one-day challenge it. If your only agenda is being free to fix your printer'a drivers [1], that may not be a deal-breaker; but many others are looking at something that provides justice alongside freedom. [2] [1]: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.h...
blagie 5y ago
Steven Levy is writing what I would consider historical fiction, but let's pretend his story is true. Context matters. Whether passwords are necessary depends on context. Many family computers don't have accounts or passwords, and it works fine for the same reasons most houses don't have bedroom doors which lock. People are trusted to not be bad actors. The early AI Lab was super-open, and it worked fine. Everyone knew each other, and there weren't (m)any bad actors. Part of the reason MIT CSAIL doesn't work as well is that it closed itself off. That's very different from a 2022-era computer facing the public internet with billions of potential attackers.

oliwarner 5y ago

Seems like a strange attack against (eg) GPL. Stallman is completely odd, but GPL's aim has nothing to do with developers and everything to do with users: Let users know and control the software they're running on their computers. This is a real world issue, even if you don't think you need it. This does have varied ramifications for developers, but all designed to prevent a downstream removing rights for a user to access the code running. And that's great, irrespective of your or my views on the chap who instigated it all.

alexvoda 5y ago

The way I see it, Stallman is an end user freedom maximalist with end user roughly meaning person sitting in front of a computer using software. Thinking like this, any obstacle blocking a user from complete control of the computation on the computer is evil. This of course completely disregards the notion of computers having owners. Unfortunately, we are currently way way in the other direction, with owners being deprived of control over owned devices by manufacturers and vendors.

ralmidani 5y ago

The problem with absolutism: it ignores how trivial it is to copy and deploy a lot of modern programs. Condemning licenses which protect against juggernauts like Amazon leaves no middle ground between free software and proprietary software.

kstrauser 5y ago
Purely for practical reasons, I tend strongly toward using FOSS in all companies I've worked for. Ideology aside, if the authors go out of business or drop support, I can still support it myself (or pay someone too). From that position, I don't see a lot of middle ground between FOSS and proprietary: either it's FOSS or it's not. I don't mean that harshly, and it's not as though I flat-out wouldn't use proprietary software. I certainly wouldn't judge others who do. It's just that I see non-FOSS software as a significant risk that has to be mitigated, perhaps by limiting its use to cases where it'd be inconvenient if it went away, as opposed to a company-ending event. I don't think that absolutism, which for me carries a connotation of purity or dogma. For me, it's a pragmatic choice. For me, software using this license doesn't have an advantage over other proprietary licenses. I view it as regular, commercial software with an trial discount. Which is OK! That doesn't make it bad!
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  > Ideology aside, if the authors go out of business or drop support, I can still support it myself (or pay someone too). If I'm not mistaken, the intention with newer licenses such as this is that developers still release the source; they're just not allowing unrestricted free use. So if they go out of business or drop support for that code, user can still continue maintaining it, at least privately. Meanwhile, the fact that the authors are getting directly compensated for the software makes it less likely that they'll go out of business or drop support. The availability of source makes a big difference, doesn't it?
  - kstrauser 5y ago
    > The availability of source makes a big difference, doesn't it? It helps a lot, but it's not sufficient by itself. Am I still allowed to use the software if the company goes away? Can I distribute it to my customers? Can I deploy it on servers it's not already deployed to? With FOSS, the answers are clear. Some commercial software also has clauses like "if we cease to exist, your license reverts to the terms of the MIT license" or such.

open-source-ux 5y ago

"I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available" I agree. The label 'source only' is considered a dirty word among some open source advocates. But if you are building a B2B (Business-to-Business) software product, 'source only' is a perfectly viable option to succesfully make a living from your product - one that isn't completely closed source (but one that clearly isn't open source). The source code of the product cannot be shared, but it can be modified by the customer to suit their needs. The idea of 'source only' is not new at all. Back in the late 90s when Delphi was popular, many developers created and sold components to other developers (e.g. UI widgets). These components came with full source code of the components but they were not open source. Fast forward to today, what are examples of 'source only' products doing well? Two examples: 'Kirby CMS' and 'Craft CMS' (Content Management Systems). Both are popular and profitable. Their source code is even published publicly on GitHub. The product creators trust customers will pay for the product (presumably some do not, but enough customers do pay so it doesn't matter). Other developers are happy to contribute to the eco-system of plugins. So, yes, it's perfectly possible to build a community of enthusiastic followers for a 'source only' product that isn't open source. WordPress is another example. Although WordPress is open source, the plugin market is full of 'source only' plugins for sale that are successful and profitable.

liuliu 5y ago
Source-only / source-available is great way to make a living. It also makes whoever purchases your software life easier. But pretending to be open-source and accepting contributions from people who mistaken your project as open-source is problematic. Or, in another word, changing your license from open-source to something else because open-source made it popular in the first place is problematic too.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  Sure, bait and switch is bad. I wasn't defending that.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  In most cases - source available is _de facto_ open-source. You have two limitations on a product: - "actual physical limitations": the fact that you have the source, and that it's not a brutally-difficult life/career-consuming endeavor to edit it. - "artificial legal limitations": what the license says you can do Typically the capabilities afforded by the latter are a strict subset of the former (legal freedom to modify is useless without the practical freedom afforded by the actual source — I could release something with the full rights afforded by an open-source license, but if I fail to actually upload my code, even if you're legally free to edit the binary, it's a mostly useless freedom). At the same time, it's very common for the legal limitations to be utterly irrelevant, whether it's a case of you simply breaking a law that's not relevant to you (perhaps from another economic sphere of the world, or maybe you're just poor — or something is abandonware and there's nobody to even pay, not even a publisher). In all of these cases only the physical limitation dictates what you're able to do. -- If someone makes a freeware game, and it's abandonware — but it's source available, people can patch it so it keeps running on modern computers. They can translate it to other languages People can even fix egregious bugs. They can analyze it, and tease out internal mechanics and secrets, and document them on a wiki. If it's source-unavailable, then they're basically screwed. Far from being hypothetical, what I'm describing is more or less how the entire rom-hacking community works — thousands of games have undergone this, where they've received unofficial translations, balance and bug fixes, etc. (I have at least a couple of personal favorites, where I had an RPG with certain abilities that infamously did nothing in the release copy, even though they supposedly applied buffs to your heroes. In a modded version, that bug was fixed and they fully worked as intended.) All of this is possible in the modding scene because this stuff existed in a state where something "awfully close to" the platform's source code was available in a non-obfuscated, direct form. It's all illegal. All of it. That entire scene can't exist, legally, and survives on this wonderful, cockroach-like survivorship mentality of simply not caring that it's illegal, dodging lawsuits, and trading copies of things in defiance of takedown requests — which in turn happen so incredibly rarely that it may as well, practically, be legal. -- Unix, for another great example, basically exists because "actual physical limitations" didn't restrict it — the devs made the source available, tons of people copied it in what was probably a rather illegal/gray-area way, and sure, some people kicked up all sorts of legal fuss about it (c.f. some famous lawsuits involving SCO group), but in practice the only thing that matters was the fact that it had illegally achieved ubiquity. At that point the genie could no longer be put back in the bottle.

ForHackernews 5y ago

> some kind of restriction on the usage of that code is necessary to protect the developers from freeloaders That's exactly the point of the (A)GPL! It prevents freeloading because you have to release your contributions back to the community. The developers on this site just hate the GPL because the lawyers at their company won't let them use those libraries.

trasz 5y ago
Are you claiming those lawyers are pulling problems out of their [..], or do you accept that there might be very real reasons for embargoing GPL, especially with many lawyers from many companies doing that?
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  I'm saying there's already a very obvious, decades-old established solution to the problem the parent commenter is raising. It's just an unpopular solution with devs on this board, because they actually want to be able to keep ~~freeloading~~ er, re-using community contributions at their well-paid jobs.
HexDecOctBin 5y ago
AGPL didn't serve MongoDB well, leading to SSPL.

kemitchell 5y ago

I remember a time when just about everybody in my world who laid hands on _Hackers_ loved it. So did I. Having reread it more recently, much later in my career, I was not no smitten.

nuclearnice3 5y ago
Would you care to provide some of the reasons for either opinion? (Or both!)
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  This post exposes some problems with what Levy called the "hacker ethic": https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.h...
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    That post is a word salad of unsubstantiated vague name-calling. > In the most intuitive case, the fact that the maker of a product, service, or program needs to recoup costs or earn fair compensation becomes irrelevant, if not overtly despised. The classic "Open source will never be popular, because people have to get paid" argument. > Software people, and their progress, über alles. ... Utopian communalism on the supply side, among programmers So free software developers are literally Commie-Nazis? Got it. > Often these strike a borderline millenialist, free-in-the-promised-land tone. Oh, and religious extremists too, I see. > The usual rules about permission, compensation, respect, and so on don’t apply, insofar as they’d apply to those making software. Also, people who use free software are all thieves and pirates, apparently.

JoshTriplett 5y ago

> I think we need to be much more willing to consider software that's released with source available, but under a license that doesn't comply with the DFSG. Hard no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) Once that line is relaxed, even slightly, more licenses like this will start showing up and running battering rams against all the other parts of that line that prove inconvenient compared to proprietary licenses. This license is proprietary. I don't care if there's source or not, it's still proprietary. It does not serve the interests of Open Source to compromise on its nature to obtain somewhat more quantity of a far lesser thing. The unusual foibles and preferences of specific people who are firmly in the history of FOSS are not relevant factors here. The relevant factor is drawing and maintaining a strict definitional line, because if we let that line become even slightly porous, it won't hold up to the resulting assault that would invite. > some kind of restriction on the usage of that code is necessary to protect the developers from freeloaders Absolutely. For instance, requirements that others share changes they make under the same license. There's been a massive push in recent decades towards permissive licenses, driven in large part by a combination of companies who find permissive licensing convenient and individual developers who project a certain counter-counterculture "do whatever you want, I don't want to think about licenses". We're now seeing the net result of that: many large companies actually using those permissive licenses as written, and not necessarily the ethos behind them.

HexDecOctBin 5y ago
MongoDB was licensed under AGPL – not a permissive license – when AWS started free loading on them. Copyleft licenses have shown themselves to be no panacea when it comes to exploitation from the multi-billion-dollar companies. If Free Software can't feed its developers, they will look for food elsewhere.
- JoshTriplett 5y ago
  Copyleft licenses are an improvement. They do not universally force payment in every case where a proprietary license could, but on the other hand, would MongoDB have become as popular in the first place if it wasn't FOSS? (And I object to the concept that hosting FOSS as a service is "freeloading". FOSS has always and only ever asked for giving back code, not money. Freeloading would be refusing to give back code, and companies regularly do fail on that front as well.) > If Free Software can't feed its developers, they will look for food elsewhere. FOSS can feed developers quite well. Some developers are deciding they'd prefer to sell proprietary software because they resent other companies benefiting from their work, and they're welcome to do that. What's not welcome is trying to claim the popularity benefits of FOSS without actually being FOSS; it is a good thing on balance that such efforts have met with chilly receptions. There are many, many conversations going on about additional ways to fund FOSS development. The ones that have a hope of succeeding aren't the ones that start by abandoning FOSS.

bradleyjg 5y ago

Many of the most useful open source projects are corporate driven. The only thing holding those companies to the usual set of licenses and provisions rather than something that would be much less open is the Schelling fence of the “open source” definition. Throw the door open to a thousand different idiosyncratic licenses and they too will abandon Apache, BSD, and MIT.

HexDecOctBin 5y ago
The reasons corporations lead open source projects is to undercut their (potential) competitors by commoditising their complements. OSI licenses are used in such projects because they allow the businesses to achieve the above. Open-source has started to become a weapons in the arsenal of Goliath against the David who may want one-day challenge it. If your only agenda is being free to fix your printer'a drivers [1], that may not be a deal-breaker; but many others are looking at something that provides justice alongside freedom. [2] [1]: https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html [2]: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.html https://writing.kemitchell.com/2020/07/03/Programmer-Power.h...

blagie 5y ago

Steven Levy is writing what I would consider historical fiction, but let's pretend his story is true. Context matters. Whether passwords are necessary depends on context. Many family computers don't have accounts or passwords, and it works fine for the same reasons most houses don't have bedroom doors which lock. People are trusted to not be bad actors. The early AI Lab was super-open, and it worked fine. Everyone knew each other, and there weren't (m)any bad actors. Part of the reason MIT CSAIL doesn't work as well is that it closed itself off. That's very different from a 2022-era computer facing the public internet with billions of potential attackers.