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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 softw

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.

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.