3 ms·

I'll just add my two cents: 1) I resonate with the spirit of the change, that too many companies are making vast sums of money on the backs of open source cont

I'll just add my two cents: 1) I resonate with the spirit of the change, that too many companies are making vast sums of money on the backs of open source contributors who work largely for free 2) Changing open source licenses is just exactly the wrong way to redistribute wealth To me, these little jabs against conceptual simplicity undermine the spirit of human progress. They're like code smells. So for example, GPLv3 thinly veils DRM, which opens the door to monopoly, surveillance capitalism and big brother because it can never be made to work without infringing on individual freedom in some way. A better way to solve the problem of wealth inequality is to codify wealth redistribution into law. This is what taxes are. Rather than nickel and diming our psyches with licensing baggage, it's better for us as a whole to just feed some portion of our proceeds back into the system so that everyone else can eat too. This is the long game that we've been forfeiting since we put all of our chips into greed-is-good crony capitalism which started around 1980. I believe that stuff like the current Hollywood writers' strike is a canary in the coal mine for capitalist history. With the arrival of AI, our monetary system is going to collapse between (pulling numbers out of the air) 2030 and 2040. Money will fall in value to such a degree that a house will cost $1 million while the minimum wage is still $10 or less. Because robots can work for free, we can't. Enough with the personal responsibility dogma. It's time for systemic change. Edit: perhaps it's unclear exactly how GPLv3 gets too nosy: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/linus_torvalds_says_gpl_v3_violates_everything/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/9m4n2g/lin... So I'm objecting to the BSL saying "this is open source unless you're our competitor". Edit 2: after thinking about this some more, I believe that in an information economy, code will become synonymous with the means of production. So UBI is an open source license that says a company can make unlimited money, as long as it gives some back to society. So there's no way to be anti-tax and pro-open source without cognitive dissonance.

josephcsible 3y ago
> GPLv3 thinly veils DRM What do you mean by this?
- zackmorris 3y ago
  Hey good question. I was maybe conflating DRM with Tivoization here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization I feel that the original vision of most open source licenses was to allow anyone to sell open source software, with the condition that any changes be fed back to contributors. That self-limits how much profit anyone can make on the backs of others, because any value added eventually goes back into the system. This is how it worked back in the Red Hat Linux days. But today it's impractical to modify the software on locked devices running open source software, like cell phones. And we have video game consoles whose software is notoriously difficult to modify because they run DRM, and their games built on open source software are also copy protected. And most open source software runs on web servers now, walled away from us and unsold, so that changes don't always get fed back into the system. Put all of this together, and I can't help but feel that the GPL protects the DRM status quo. That may not have been intentional, but here we are. I view any restriction or even inconvenience on the user (where jailbreaked devices work better), or dictating what users can do with their software or devices, as DRM. That stuff should never be allowed to use open source software. And even linking to GPL code can infect non-GPL software with the GPL license, forcing users to decide if they want to use the LGPL instead. I find this distinction so exhausting to reason about and unnecessarily open to legal challenge that I usually avoid the (L)GPL altogether. I would have preferred to see a license derived from MIT with a new clause that says if you sell or distribute the software in a locked device, then any changes must be fed back to developers. But maybe GPLv3 is as close as we can get. And it still doesn't solve the problem of open source software locked behind web servers. But maybe it's important to preserve the freedom to do that, as Linus Torvalds said in that video: that it's none of our business what people do with our software (<- as long as they don't sell a modified version without feeding changes back). And admittedly, IANAL so I might be reading this all wrong. Here are the best links I could find: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-and-gplv3 https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-a... https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...

josephcsible 3y ago

> GPLv3 thinly veils DRM What do you mean by this?

zackmorris 3y ago
Hey good question. I was maybe conflating DRM with Tivoization here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization I feel that the original vision of most open source licenses was to allow anyone to sell open source software, with the condition that any changes be fed back to contributors. That self-limits how much profit anyone can make on the backs of others, because any value added eventually goes back into the system. This is how it worked back in the Red Hat Linux days. But today it's impractical to modify the software on locked devices running open source software, like cell phones. And we have video game consoles whose software is notoriously difficult to modify because they run DRM, and their games built on open source software are also copy protected. And most open source software runs on web servers now, walled away from us and unsold, so that changes don't always get fed back into the system. Put all of this together, and I can't help but feel that the GPL protects the DRM status quo. That may not have been intentional, but here we are. I view any restriction or even inconvenience on the user (where jailbreaked devices work better), or dictating what users can do with their software or devices, as DRM. That stuff should never be allowed to use open source software. And even linking to GPL code can infect non-GPL software with the GPL license, forcing users to decide if they want to use the LGPL instead. I find this distinction so exhausting to reason about and unnecessarily open to legal challenge that I usually avoid the (L)GPL altogether. I would have preferred to see a license derived from MIT with a new clause that says if you sell or distribute the software in a locked device, then any changes must be fed back to developers. But maybe GPLv3 is as close as we can get. And it still doesn't solve the problem of open source software locked behind web servers. But maybe it's important to preserve the freedom to do that, as Linus Torvalds said in that video: that it's none of our business what people do with our software (<- as long as they don't sell a modified version without feeding changes back). And admittedly, IANAL so I might be reading this all wrong. Here are the best links I could find: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DRMProhibited https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.en.html https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-and-gplv3 https://www.ifross.org/?q=en/what-difference-between-gplv2-a... https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://lwn.net/Articles/200651/ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynamic https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...