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I hope one day it will be a country somewhere on Earth who will have a ban for non-free software in the Constitution. The reality has changed too much to trust

I hope one day it will be a country somewhere on Earth who will have a ban for non-free software in the Constitution. The reality has changed too much to trust some people in govt to protect us from megacorps. We really need Richard Stallman kind of guy as a president of at least a tiniest country in the whole mad world.

Flameancer 3y ago
That seems like a sure fire way to hamstring your country. Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? Would you install trackers and block the internet in general so citizens can’t get software that’s open source. Would you demand visitors to surrender their devices while visiting so the authorities can check for non-free software installed?
- cturner 3y ago
  These are fair criticisms of the proposal. A similar but more workable path would be a constitutional clause to 1. limit the concept of property to scarce goods and 2. outlaw the creation of legal mechanisms like copyright.
  - 9dev 3y ago
    We tried something similar once. It broke down quickly, led to the rich owning everything, required a surveillance nightmare to function, and left a permanent scar on the world. I don’t think we should in engage this idea again.
    - eimrine 3y ago
      We did not try mass refusal of defective by design technologies since Clair Patterson.
    - cturner 3y ago
      I do not understand your point. (or maybe you did not understand mine)
      - 9dev 3y ago
        > limit the concept of property to scarce goods This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results. You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.
        cturner 3y ago
        There is no analogy between (strengthening scarce-property rights) and (communism). There is no analogy between (preventing copyright) and (communism).
        9dev 3y ago
        You did not say strengthen scarce-property rights; you mentioned abolishing property rights for things other than scarce goods.
        cturner 3y ago
        Higher up, I phrased it the other way around - but they are the same thing. The creation of property rights around non-scarce things undermines scarce property rights. There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights. Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc. Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.) By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards. Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now. A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.
- bambax 3y ago
  Like the original article explains well, the question isn't technical, it's legal. You don't have to inspect users' devices if you make selling licences illegal, because then nobody can legally make money selling them.
- eimrine 3y ago
  > Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? The law I proposed has to be working against governments and semi-government institution such as banks, not about random Joes. The firmware question is interesting, because there is no such thing as FLOSS hardware except of some low-end microcontrollers, thank you for noticing. The most decent way of achieving this state seems like to prohibit only import of new devices and don't even bother about user's ones or anything second-hand. I have an observation that if you have 2 identical laptops but one with Nvidia/Amd and one with Intel HD then the former laptop will die naturally, such as any laptop with Ati today, while the latter laptop keeps serving until the physical death. You can install Ati driver for Windows 7 but can not for Windows 8 and never; also proprietary Ati driver fails to work with modern Linux stack while free Ati driver uses to much energy to consider the device as a laptop. This is an example of natural death of proprietary hardware/software, just stop import new proprietary devices. Any authorities checking user devices for anything is a way of tyranny/authoritarism/totalitarism, nowadays the governmenns are working into totally another way, elusive to see for us the adults. In XXI governments use to propagate this or that ideas in schools. Teach them to have their fun and games in GNU/Linux distros and prohibit teachers to propagate Microsoft, Zoom, Viber, Google without restricting usage of these service for leisure. When the proprietary devices will start begging to buy a new hardware but it will not be available inside of the country then we will found ourselves in a new world. > Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? There is no such thing in XXI as an independed government without a large dev team.
wizardforhire 3y ago
Yes and… We need a figure head with a strong moral and ethical compass who lives in private as if they are in public. Whom is capable of addressing all situations with grace, elegance, respect, compassion, and humility in that order only in reverse. One whom is frugal, well read, and courteous. One whom in being frugal is able to think of all and is able to stand fast in the face of corruption as they deep down truly experience the interconnectedness of life and by proxy society… and through experiences, travels and interactions has attained a working understanding of the all pervasive ripple effect. Oh yeah, and this person has to be willing to martyr themselves as the public life sucks!
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  Yeah, we need a good dictator (...) or we need to create federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making as an alternative to current systems.
  - wizardforhire 3y ago
    Who said anything about a dictator? What I was describing is the hypothetical dream traits of what I perceive are a necessity to be an effective leader in this era. It’s a tall ask but someone embodying those traits would scoff at the notion of wanting, let alone keeping power! If you’d like to see what federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making looks like and how it feels to participate in I challenge you to join a local planning commission in your city if you haven’t already and if you live in america of course…
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    How about everyone self organizes into 2000ish person communes, all structured in the way they feel life is best lived?
dottedmag 3y ago
Open source is a technical detail. One can see a less drastical change that will have the same effect. 1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are: - Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner. - Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner. - Spying on a user is an unlawful search. 2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job. 3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years. 4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.
- ozim 3y ago
  I branch off company close branch down because it was unprofitable - I don’t have to support device. Other approach, only huge companies start making devices because medium size companies cannot take the risk of the refunds. Users are worse off, companies are worse off everything with the outlined rules is worse. Making law is hard.
  - fifteen1506 3y ago
    Agreed. Still, reverse engineering unsupported software or hardware should be made legal.
    - tacocataco 3y ago
      Why can't it enter the public domain by default? Like how copyright used to work for media.
  - dottedmag 3y ago
    Make managers personally responsible.
- anonymousab 3y ago
  > bought digital content The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion". You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state. That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow. But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.
jorvi 3y ago
I’ve always dreamt of at least the EU and China (yes I know of Kylin) mandating libre software for governmental use. Could you imagine the gigantic amount of flow of money that goes into Microsoft enterprise and Office support instead flowing into open source? And the amount of bug that amount of eyeballs would catch. Both the Linux desktop and things like LibreOffice would see meteoric improvements within the year. Right now there is already some chances budding (in Spain’s regional governments, Munich, France’s military), it just needs to be pulled together into a comprehensive plan and get a good push.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  It's an idealism, for sure; but after reading about experiments like Hamburg's maybe we'll get there eventually. But what's far more important (and practical) than mandating libre software is mandating libre file formats, and this is what we've seen happen somewhat successfully around the world: governments requiring official documents to be primarily available in PDF/A and/or OpenDocument (c.f. OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice) instead of (say) MSFT's Office OOXML formats.
- em-bee 3y ago
  china is actually trying, but it is not easy to get every governmental employee to listen and enforce such a change. in europe on the other hand the issue is entirely political. a city switches to linux. when the leading party changes it switches back because microsoft promises some benefits like jobs or worse kickbacks, or the new leader is simply ignorant and actually believes that windows is better.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Germany offered the UK a "test and trace" app during the corona virus pandemic. The UK government of course refused, because producing an app was an opportunity to divert £37 Billion (!) from taxes to their associates. The delay in not taking the completed app also would have cost thousands of lives. In short, the first thing you need is people who care about their countrymen. People often propose ideas that start from an assumption that politicians want to make the World better, but the ones in power in the UK at least are more motivated by other things: greed for example.
timwaagh 3y ago
[flagged]
- eimrine 3y ago
  Where are the lunches going from? I can bet a few dollars that you as a hired dev are mistreating your users making their computers to do a lot of things they are not aware of for the sake of cancer like growing of your favorite industry. RMS is Clair Patterson of our world and programmers like you are equivalent of those guys who unfairly claim that leaded fuel is OK and a lot of lead in the air was since the creation of the world.
  - timwaagh 3y ago
    You lost your bet. I don't abuse our users. How much did I earn? I'm not sure what you have against hired developers. We just want to earn money for coding, is this a crime?
buzzert 3y ago
I don't understand, why is it not enough to just... use free software? Why must the government be involved at all?

Flameancer 3y ago

That seems like a sure fire way to hamstring your country. Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? Would you install trackers and block the internet in general so citizens can’t get software that’s open source. Would you demand visitors to surrender their devices while visiting so the authorities can check for non-free software installed?

cturner 3y ago
These are fair criticisms of the proposal. A similar but more workable path would be a constitutional clause to 1. limit the concept of property to scarce goods and 2. outlaw the creation of legal mechanisms like copyright.
- 9dev 3y ago
  We tried something similar once. It broke down quickly, led to the rich owning everything, required a surveillance nightmare to function, and left a permanent scar on the world. I don’t think we should in engage this idea again.
  - eimrine 3y ago
    We did not try mass refusal of defective by design technologies since Clair Patterson.
  - cturner 3y ago
    I do not understand your point. (or maybe you did not understand mine)
    - 9dev 3y ago
      > limit the concept of property to scarce goods This is a very powerful yet very dangerous train of thought. Modifications to the concept of property were at the heart of the way communism has been implemented in the USSR, and it led to awful results. You might have a different goal in mind, but so did many of those involved in the October revolution.
      - cturner 3y ago
        There is no analogy between (strengthening scarce-property rights) and (communism). There is no analogy between (preventing copyright) and (communism).
        9dev 3y ago
        You did not say strengthen scarce-property rights; you mentioned abolishing property rights for things other than scarce goods.
        cturner 3y ago
        Higher up, I phrased it the other way around - but they are the same thing. The creation of property rights around non-scarce things undermines scarce property rights. There is a contest between scarce rights and non-scarce rights. At the moment, developed-world nations default to a position where non-scarce rights overrule scarce rights. Example 1. Consider your ownership of a computer. A computer is scarce property. In a regime that respects only scarce rights, you could do what you like with it. In the regime that runs developed countries at the moment, there are all kinds of things we cannot do with it due to "intellectual property" rights. If you paid a company for some software in the past, you cannot do maintenance work on that software because the person who wrote it own the copyright to it. Even though you own a hard disk, you are not allowed to make copies of bits on that disk that are held to be copyright-protected. There are non-scarce things you are not allowed to distribute, non-scarce things you are not allowed to bundle, legalese garbage you have to pay lip-service to, etc. Example 2. Imagine you manufacture mobile phones. One day you get a nastygram from a competitor who says that you are infringing on their patents. You send your team to look into it. They learn that years ago this competitor was able to secure patents on some basic techniques. In some places, patents have been granted on some things that are fundamental - it is not clear whether it would even be possible to operate in the domain without using these approaches. Your engineering team unknowingly reimplemented those same ideas from first principles while they were building the phone. You are left with a choice - 1. pay up; 2. try to appeal the patent (good luck training a non-technical judge or jury in this highly complex domain to a standard so they can reject the patent); 3. find a way to achieve outcomes without infringing on the patents. Again - non-scarce rights are severely impacting your reasonable use of scarce property. (In a scenario similar to this, Intel failed in the mobile phone space a few years back despite strong support from Apple. Quallcom has very strong patent coverage in that space.) By law you own the metal and silicon that is in front of you. Yet there are all of these laws that prevent you from making free use of it, with each of them being grounded in somebody else's non-scarce "property" rights. How did this come about? About a century ago, governments started changing the concept of property from what everybody had understood it to be for thousands of years (scarce goods) to the arbitrary "bundle of rights" definition, and begun attaching the benefits of property to things that were not scarce. Then trade agreements were used to establish these as international standards. Above you said that I was proposing a dystopia. Not so. The dystopia is what we have now. A constitutional limitation of property rights to scarce property should strongly strengthen scarce property rights over what we have at the moment.
bambax 3y ago
Like the original article explains well, the question isn't technical, it's legal. You don't have to inspect users' devices if you make selling licences illegal, because then nobody can legally make money selling them.
eimrine 3y ago
> Does that also include firmware for devices? Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? The law I proposed has to be working against governments and semi-government institution such as banks, not about random Joes. The firmware question is interesting, because there is no such thing as FLOSS hardware except of some low-end microcontrollers, thank you for noticing. The most decent way of achieving this state seems like to prohibit only import of new devices and don't even bother about user's ones or anything second-hand. I have an observation that if you have 2 identical laptops but one with Nvidia/Amd and one with Intel HD then the former laptop will die naturally, such as any laptop with Ati today, while the latter laptop keeps serving until the physical death. You can install Ati driver for Windows 7 but can not for Windows 8 and never; also proprietary Ati driver fails to work with modern Linux stack while free Ati driver uses to much energy to consider the device as a laptop. This is an example of natural death of proprietary hardware/software, just stop import new proprietary devices. Any authorities checking user devices for anything is a way of tyranny/authoritarism/totalitarism, nowadays the governmenns are working into totally another way, elusive to see for us the adults. In XXI governments use to propagate this or that ideas in schools. Teach them to have their fun and games in GNU/Linux distros and prohibit teachers to propagate Microsoft, Zoom, Viber, Google without restricting usage of these service for leisure. When the proprietary devices will start begging to buy a new hardware but it will not be available inside of the country then we will found ourselves in a new world. > Will this government have a large dev team to make software that its populace can use? There is no such thing in XXI as an independed government without a large dev team.

wizardforhire 3y ago

Yes and… We need a figure head with a strong moral and ethical compass who lives in private as if they are in public. Whom is capable of addressing all situations with grace, elegance, respect, compassion, and humility in that order only in reverse. One whom is frugal, well read, and courteous. One whom in being frugal is able to think of all and is able to stand fast in the face of corruption as they deep down truly experience the interconnectedness of life and by proxy society… and through experiences, travels and interactions has attained a working understanding of the all pervasive ripple effect. Oh yeah, and this person has to be willing to martyr themselves as the public life sucks!

TotalCrackpot 3y ago
Yeah, we need a good dictator (...) or we need to create federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making as an alternative to current systems.
- wizardforhire 3y ago
  Who said anything about a dictator? What I was describing is the hypothetical dream traits of what I perceive are a necessity to be an effective leader in this era. It’s a tall ask but someone embodying those traits would scoff at the notion of wanting, let alone keeping power! If you’d like to see what federated horizontal power structures with consensus decision making looks like and how it feels to participate in I challenge you to join a local planning commission in your city if you haven’t already and if you live in america of course…
- tacocataco 3y ago
  How about everyone self organizes into 2000ish person communes, all structured in the way they feel life is best lived?

dottedmag 3y ago

Open source is a technical detail. One can see a less drastical change that will have the same effect. 1. Update the laws so that the shenanigans of the companies are finally named as they are: - Retroactively removing a feature is stealing from the owner. - Deleting bought digital content is also stealing from the owner. - Spying on a user is an unlawful search. 2. Make these transgressions be investigated by the prosecutor's office, so that a citizen only needs to report it to them and not figure out how to get a class lawsuit going. This will allow security researchers to do their job. 3. Classify devices with unpatched and unpatcheable security bugs as "unfit for use" and eligible for a full unconditional refund, and extend warranties on them to, say, 15 years. 4. Obviously, make any kind of security research legal and protected from intimidation by the companies.

ozim 3y ago
I branch off company close branch down because it was unprofitable - I don’t have to support device. Other approach, only huge companies start making devices because medium size companies cannot take the risk of the refunds. Users are worse off, companies are worse off everything with the outlined rules is worse. Making law is hard.
- fifteen1506 3y ago
  Agreed. Still, reverse engineering unsupported software or hardware should be made legal.
  - tacocataco 3y ago
    Why can't it enter the public domain by default? Like how copyright used to work for media.
- dottedmag 3y ago
  Make managers personally responsible.
anonymousab 3y ago
> bought digital content The fundamental problem lies here: you haven't actually bought anything useful. You didn't buy content, you bought a license, and that license is merely "you might be able to view content in a very specific way for an unspecified amount of time that is completely at our discretion". You still have what you bought when they revoke the license, it's just in a different and less useful state. That whole system needs to be crushed into dust to make a real difference. Make it so that buying a license to content isn't a thing - that you are now actually buying content - and all of the things that come with ownership will follow. But I don't see any viable path to that happening. A sightly more possible outcome would be to have a minimum standards/requirements for digital content purposes - a set of required rights/restrictions/components for any digital purchase the all licenses must incorporate or cannot compromise on.

jorvi 3y ago

I’ve always dreamt of at least the EU and China (yes I know of Kylin) mandating libre software for governmental use. Could you imagine the gigantic amount of flow of money that goes into Microsoft enterprise and Office support instead flowing into open source? And the amount of bug that amount of eyeballs would catch. Both the Linux desktop and things like LibreOffice would see meteoric improvements within the year. Right now there is already some chances budding (in Spain’s regional governments, Munich, France’s military), it just needs to be pulled together into a comprehensive plan and get a good push.

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
It's an idealism, for sure; but after reading about experiments like Hamburg's maybe we'll get there eventually. But what's far more important (and practical) than mandating libre software is mandating libre file formats, and this is what we've seen happen somewhat successfully around the world: governments requiring official documents to be primarily available in PDF/A and/or OpenDocument (c.f. OpenOfficeOrg/LibreOffice) instead of (say) MSFT's Office OOXML formats.
em-bee 3y ago
china is actually trying, but it is not easy to get every governmental employee to listen and enforce such a change. in europe on the other hand the issue is entirely political. a city switches to linux. when the leading party changes it switches back because microsoft promises some benefits like jobs or worse kickbacks, or the new leader is simply ignorant and actually believes that windows is better.
pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Germany offered the UK a "test and trace" app during the corona virus pandemic. The UK government of course refused, because producing an app was an opportunity to divert £37 Billion (!) from taxes to their associates. The delay in not taking the completed app also would have cost thousands of lives. In short, the first thing you need is people who care about their countrymen. People often propose ideas that start from an assumption that politicians want to make the World better, but the ones in power in the UK at least are more motivated by other things: greed for example.

timwaagh 3y ago

[flagged]

eimrine 3y ago
Where are the lunches going from? I can bet a few dollars that you as a hired dev are mistreating your users making their computers to do a lot of things they are not aware of for the sake of cancer like growing of your favorite industry. RMS is Clair Patterson of our world and programmers like you are equivalent of those guys who unfairly claim that leaded fuel is OK and a lot of lead in the air was since the creation of the world.
- timwaagh 3y ago
  You lost your bet. I don't abuse our users. How much did I earn? I'm not sure what you have against hired developers. We just want to earn money for coding, is this a crime?

buzzert 3y ago

I don't understand, why is it not enough to just... use free software? Why must the government be involved at all?