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They could just not do it. Spend your time more wisely. If you git commit, you've lost your leverage. Don't go write a labor politics blog post about how you're

They could just not do it. Spend your time more wisely. If you git commit, you've lost your leverage. Don't go write a labor politics blog post about how you're enslaved for writing C for free.

altairprime 3y ago
Open source is labor politics. Copyleft is shorthand for “I labor to create this work for the commons, and all who modify my work must adhere to my labor politics by sharing their modifications with the commons.” It’s designed specifically to counteract commercial exploitation of labor while denying the commons their modified works. Without labor politics, there would be no GPL, no AGPL, no Sharealike. (Ironically, my single sentence license above would be more likely to win a court challenge than the GPL/AGPL, while also being more resilient to new methodologies and less vulnerable to loopholes; however, it’s incompatible with the “legal contracts should not depend on human judgment calls” viewpoint that’s popular in technical circles.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  We don't have to speculate about whether the GPL would stand a court challenge as it has been tested in court many times in multiple jurisdictions.[1] As an aside, the reason I don't think your statement would work is you don't have the ability to unilaterally bind other people by a statement you make without their agreement (ie you saying something is not a contract, because that is by definition an agreement between parties). For that reason I'm pretty sure your "all who modify my work must ..." subclause would have no legal force. The mechanism that copyleft licenses use is to grant rights to the user provided that the user adheres to the terms. That's something you can do, because it's up to you to grant whatever rights you want to grant and it's in your gift to set conditions on those grants. If users don't accept the terms of the license, they don't get granted the rights and therefore they are prevented from using or distributing the software by normal copyright law. [1] eg check out http://gpl-violations.org/news/ http://gpl-violations.org/news/ or https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/apr/02/vmware-no-appeal/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/apr/02/vmware-no-appeal/ etc
  - altairprime 3y ago
    Noted! I’ll tune a couple words next time :)

They could just not do it. Spend your time more wisely. If you git commit, you've lost your leverage. Don't go write a labor politics blog post about how you're enslaved for writing C for free.

altairprime 3y ago

Open source is labor politics. Copyleft is shorthand for “I labor to create this work for the commons, and all who modify my work must adhere to my labor politics by sharing their modifications with the commons.” It’s designed specifically to counteract commercial exploitation of labor while denying the commons their modified works. Without labor politics, there would be no GPL, no AGPL, no Sharealike. (Ironically, my single sentence license above would be more likely to win a court challenge than the GPL/AGPL, while also being more resilient to new methodologies and less vulnerable to loopholes; however, it’s incompatible with the “legal contracts should not depend on human judgment calls” viewpoint that’s popular in technical circles.

seanhunter 3y ago
We don't have to speculate about whether the GPL would stand a court challenge as it has been tested in court many times in multiple jurisdictions.[1] As an aside, the reason I don't think your statement would work is you don't have the ability to unilaterally bind other people by a statement you make without their agreement (ie you saying something is not a contract, because that is by definition an agreement between parties). For that reason I'm pretty sure your "all who modify my work must ..." subclause would have no legal force. The mechanism that copyleft licenses use is to grant rights to the user provided that the user adheres to the terms. That's something you can do, because it's up to you to grant whatever rights you want to grant and it's in your gift to set conditions on those grants. If users don't accept the terms of the license, they don't get granted the rights and therefore they are prevented from using or distributing the software by normal copyright law. [1] eg check out http://gpl-violations.org/news/ http://gpl-violations.org/news/ or https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/apr/02/vmware-no-appeal/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/apr/02/vmware-no-appeal/ etc
- altairprime 3y ago
  Noted! I’ll tune a couple words next time :)