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We are in agreement, mostly, the only point of contention is that I never want to see a single organization being held, alone, as the sole arbiter of which lice

by brabel 3y ago

We are in agreement, mostly, the only point of contention is that I never want to see a single organization being held, alone, as the sole arbiter of which license is open source and which is not. The world is a big place. There's room for multiple organizations with different priorities and interests to define things like this and anyone who claims "there must be only one" is suspect in my view as that's such an authoritarian point of view that I can't reconcile that kind of position with also being a supporter of the freedoms that are central to the open source movement.

bayindirh 3y ago
I agree with you on that. Ideally, I'd love to have multiple institutions working on these issues, but while the idea is nice, it involves humans. Corporations (ab)using permissive licenses to lure people to give away their code for internet points, and many of the same companies do not give away the code they improved upon. Even GPL is violated by some firms and they deny to obey it when they caught red handed or even flat out accept that they violate it and don't change their behavior. Same corporations scare people away from strong copyleft licenses solely because it doesn't help their bottom lines, but they tell other things instead of admitting that they want free labor. Sometimes they even "sherlock" an application by inviting the developer to headquarters, luring them to talk about the design, re-implement it, and be very reluctant to even thank the dev whose dearest project is killed with a one swift lightsaber swing (read "The day AppGet died"). After seeing all this brouhaha and sinister motivations, muddying Open Source software and redefining it to "Software which is developed by enthusiasts which are lured by GitHub stars, permissively licensed, used by corporations and never supported back", and a couple of very successful projects with wise BDFLs, I'd prefer to have a trustworthy BDFL instead of institutions with varying motivations and agendas. While we talked about GitHub, then there's whole CoPilot saga which crawls open source repositories, and conveniently forgets to understand what licenses mean, but I digress. At the end of the day, Free Software (and even Open Source Software) is an idealistic endeavor first, and companies don't care about anything which is not money.

by brabel 3y ago

bayindirh 3y ago

I agree with you on that. Ideally, I'd love to have multiple institutions working on these issues, but while the idea is nice, it involves humans. Corporations (ab)using permissive licenses to lure people to give away their code for internet points, and many of the same companies do not give away the code they improved upon. Even GPL is violated by some firms and they deny to obey it when they caught red handed or even flat out accept that they violate it and don't change their behavior. Same corporations scare people away from strong copyleft licenses solely because it doesn't help their bottom lines, but they tell other things instead of admitting that they want free labor. Sometimes they even "sherlock" an application by inviting the developer to headquarters, luring them to talk about the design, re-implement it, and be very reluctant to even thank the dev whose dearest project is killed with a one swift lightsaber swing (read "The day AppGet died"). After seeing all this brouhaha and sinister motivations, muddying Open Source software and redefining it to "Software which is developed by enthusiasts which are lured by GitHub stars, permissively licensed, used by corporations and never supported back", and a couple of very successful projects with wise BDFLs, I'd prefer to have a trustworthy BDFL instead of institutions with varying motivations and agendas. While we talked about GitHub, then there's whole CoPilot saga which crawls open source repositories, and conveniently forgets to understand what licenses mean, but I digress. At the end of the day, Free Software (and even Open Source Software) is an idealistic endeavor first, and companies don't care about anything which is not money.