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It is sort of interesting how there are practical logistical issues with making bespoke licenses. I would not want my work to end up being used by weapons manu
by rtpg 3y ago
It is sort of interesting how there are practical logistical issues with making bespoke licenses.
I would not want my work to end up being used by weapons manufacturers[0]. I honestly would like to put this into licenses. But there would be endless kvetching at such a license being used, of course. But so much OSS tooling is relying on how we have ended up with a lot of mutual compatible licenses, and having any sort of weirdness ends up excluding you from being bundled in repros.
There is a line that could be crossed here (and has been crossed by more than one very large project!), and I get ... annoyed at 'licenses' like the WTFPL. But when people get frustrated at seeing American companies deploy tooling to help with things like mass censorship in authoritarian regimes, I think about how we might be a couple license changes away from making that job way harder.
[0]: Not making a blanket statement for people working there! I simply do not want to participate.
- Shawnj2 3y agoI like the “open source will be enforced” nature of GPLv3 for that reason. Yes,it does mean that a developer some some huge company will have to write their own version of your project instead of just using yours and thus your code would be less widely used than if it hadn’t, but on the other hand if I choose to work on something for free and available to everyone you making the thing you made also free and available to everyone is completely reasonable, benefitting open source projects and community use while also making it disproportionately harder for people trying to hide the software in a different evil program of some sort. Obviously it’s not perfect but I’ve always viewed the relative exclusivity of the GPL to be one of its pros.