3 ms·

you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do

by mplewis 1mo ago

fangspire 1mo ago
But laws are just encodes morality.
- Dylan16807 1mo ago
  Many of them are, but they're focused on big picture issues and preventing harm. Most of morality has no legal force.
- ultrarunner 1mo ago
  Funny how morality so often benefits incumbents and the powerful.
- marcus_holmes 1mo ago
  Absolutely not. It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
  - lukan 1mo ago
    Yes they do, but not with a philosophical concept of morality, but merely those of the ruling class/majority.
  - buran77 1mo ago
    It's not really that "absolute". Laws are not all made the same. Some start as a reflection of what society considers "right" at the time. Then the laws fall behind as society's morality reaches a tipping point. So the society pulls that part of the legal system behind it. Other laws are progressive, and they pull society's morality behind them. Some are driven by/for the majority, and some by/for the elites. But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
  - vasco 1mo ago
    Well this goes into the debate of "is morality absolute or relative" which gets religious fast and there's more books on the subject than we have time to read.
    - marcus_holmes 1mo ago
      I actually think that's a separate debate. The question of "are laws there to enforce morality, or enforce public order?" is the key one. And, I think, very easily settled by looking at the laws we choose to implement. Almost none of them enforce moral behaviour (e.g. you must give 10% of your income to charity), they're all about enforcing how we interact and how we're ruled.
  - fangspire 1mo ago
    >It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.
    - BizarroLand 1mo ago
      It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute. "Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years). "Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years) They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it. Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
      - marcus_holmes 1mo ago
        The one I find fascinating is eating animals. We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it. It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral and indefensible.
        fangspire 1mo ago
        Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion). Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.
  - pocksuppet 1mo ago
    That was the morality at the time.
- gib444 1mo ago
  That's genuinely hilarious.
rdbl27 1mo ago
Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated. In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone. Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.
- Dylan16807 1mo ago
  > Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated. It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear. > In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone. Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
  - rdbl27 28d ago
    So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point. Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine. "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
    - Dylan16807 26d ago
      > So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point. Requirements are about legal obligations, not moral ones. > Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine. It's in general fine not to donate to libreoffice. But that doesn't extend to 100% of circumstances. > "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant. As a third party I can judge someone for not donating based on their circumstances. It's not irrelevant. The moral implications are not part of the definition of donation.
satvikpendem 1mo ago
Who decides what the right thing to do is? Everyone has different opinions.
- kennywinker 1mo ago
  Mostly individuals decide what they will do, and then communities decide if they respect that or not. Doesn't exactly apply to companies tho, since they're functionally sociopaths.
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    Yes, each individual has individual notions on what the right thing to do is, is my point. There is no objective reality to it.
duskdozer 1mo ago
I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return. If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.
- chias 1mo ago
  > I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?
- germandiago 1mo ago
  > because people looking to make money will not care about what's right This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual. How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
  - satvikpendem 1mo ago
    That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed. Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
    - germandiago 1mo ago
foxglacier 1mo ago
"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?

you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do

by mplewis 1mo ago

you people are always mixing up the legal thing to do with the right thing to do

fangspire 1mo ago

But laws are just encodes morality.

Dylan16807 1mo ago
Many of them are, but they're focused on big picture issues and preventing harm. Most of morality has no legal force.
ultrarunner 1mo ago
Funny how morality so often benefits incumbents and the powerful.
marcus_holmes 1mo ago
Absolutely not. It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Laws have nothing to do with morality. Or justice.
- lukan 1mo ago
  Yes they do, but not with a philosophical concept of morality, but merely those of the ruling class/majority.
- buran77 1mo ago
  It's not really that "absolute". Laws are not all made the same. Some start as a reflection of what society considers "right" at the time. Then the laws fall behind as society's morality reaches a tipping point. So the society pulls that part of the legal system behind it. Other laws are progressive, and they pull society's morality behind them. Some are driven by/for the majority, and some by/for the elites. But they all reflect the morality of society to a degree, whether the democratic majority, or the powerful minority.
- vasco 1mo ago
  Well this goes into the debate of "is morality absolute or relative" which gets religious fast and there's more books on the subject than we have time to read.
  - marcus_holmes 1mo ago
    I actually think that's a separate debate. The question of "are laws there to enforce morality, or enforce public order?" is the key one. And, I think, very easily settled by looking at the laws we choose to implement. Almost none of them enforce moral behaviour (e.g. you must give 10% of your income to charity), they're all about enforcing how we interact and how we're ruled.
- fangspire 1mo ago
  >It was illegal to harbour escaped slaves. Or hide Jews from the Gestapo. Yes, of course. Morality is relative. In a slave-owning society, harbouring escaped slaves is immoral.
  - BizarroLand 1mo ago
    It is somewhat interesting that the version of morality an individual possesses always feels to that individual as an absolute. "Of course it's wrong to beat your wife!" says the person who beats their children in a society that has only recently ceased infantilizing their women (USA circa 1900 +/- 30 years). "Of course it's wrong to own slaves!" says the person whose society only recently began protesting against and/or illegalizing slavery (USA circa 1866 +/- 10 years) They say this not knowing that had the event of their births been moved a few decades in the wrong direction their morality would have shifted with it. Those same people might have said "Of course its wrong to beat your wife with a rod thicker than your thumb!" or "Of course its ok to own slaves as long as you treat them well!" at the same point in their lives had they been born maybe 30-50 years earlier.
    - marcus_holmes 1mo ago
      The one I find fascinating is eating animals. We currently eat animals as a normal part of our diet (for most of us, including me, anyway). To do this we treat the animals horribly. Incredibly badly. And we know it. It's very easy to see how society's morals will probably change on this, in fact are changing on this, and how in 50 years' time our current stance on eating animals could be seen as monstrously immoral and indefensible.
      - fangspire 1mo ago
        Animals eat each other. Often in ways more "horrible" than what we do to them (in quotes because nothing in nature is horrible. Horror is a human notion). Animals are not moral agents, and eating them is not different from eating plants. Both are part of the biosphere that we manage to our benefit.
- pocksuppet 1mo ago
  That was the morality at the time.
gib444 1mo ago
That's genuinely hilarious.

rdbl27 1mo ago

Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated. In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone. Your feelings about what constitutes "the right thing to do" are apparently different from those of the authors. You believe you know better than they themselves do how they should be treated.

Dylan16807 1mo ago
> Surely "the right thing to do" includes some element of the authors' explicitly stated preferences about how they wish to be treated. It does! And they wish to get donations. There's a button right at the top on the site making that clear. > In this case, they chose -- explicitly -- to NOT require any payment or contribution from anyone. Yes, so what? It is true that they wished to not require payment. That is one of their wishes, but they have more than one wish. And if they required payment, that wouldn't be a donation anyway.
- rdbl27 28d ago
  So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point. Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine. "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant.
  - Dylan16807 26d ago
    > So.... Since they explicitly chose not to require any payment, there is no moral obligation to pay them. That's the point. Requirements are about legal obligations, not moral ones. > Would it be nice? Sure. But "not donating" is also fine. It's in general fine not to donate to libreoffice. But that doesn't extend to 100% of circumstances. > "Donations" are, by definition, entirely voluntary. Whether someone using the software under its proper licensing terms is wealthy, whether you approve of their business model, or other factors are all irrelevant. As a third party I can judge someone for not donating based on their circumstances. It's not irrelevant. The moral implications are not part of the definition of donation.

satvikpendem 1mo ago

Who decides what the right thing to do is? Everyone has different opinions.

kennywinker 1mo ago
Mostly individuals decide what they will do, and then communities decide if they respect that or not. Doesn't exactly apply to companies tho, since they're functionally sociopaths.
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  Yes, each individual has individual notions on what the right thing to do is, is my point. There is no objective reality to it.

duskdozer 1mo ago

I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing, because people looking to make money will not care about what's right. So, it makes sense to point out the disconnect when people use and promote pro-corporate licenses and then get upset when corporates follow them to the letter and provide them nothing but demands in return. If you want a mutually beneficial community, you should contribute and distribute using a license that requires it.

chias 1mo ago
> I agree that it would be the right thing to do. Which is why you have to make the best attempt to make it the legal thing Do you believe that in an ideal world, any instance of not "doing the right thing" should be illegal?
germandiago 1mo ago
> because people looking to make money will not care about what's right This is two-sided: making a kind of license mandatory also shrinks adoption if it is more restrictive. So, even if I acknowledge there is truth in your side of the story, there is also another at the other side, as usual. How many people use GPL-licensed software as opposed to MIT licensed?
- satvikpendem 1mo ago
  That is not the problem of GPL. I'd rather have high quality software with patches shared back and always being able to see the code than some popular software that eventually is used in some corporate environment without the ability see what they changed. Regardless, who cares about "adoption?" That's not the original point of open source which was that if you're working on something and you wanted to share it, you could, without any expectation of usage, merely that it might help just one extra person out there. It's simply human ego to care about adoption and GitHub usage and stars especially have accelerated this.
  - germandiago 1mo ago

foxglacier 1mo ago

"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?