@jens Not exactly how free software came about (because it is distinct from freeware), but one of the effects is indeed that the software cannot be kept from being gratis! EVER! (Which is NOT true of freeware.)
@jens Google insisted on paying me for my fonts that are part of Google Fonts, but I wouldn’t take it. They still had to put some payment on the books! It was very frustrating. They could always simply have used the fonts! They were all either public domain or expat licensed. They finally agreed to make a donation to the FSF. :)
They also had me relicense them copylefted, even though they could have done THAT themselves, too!
I had the opposite experience, with RedHat asking me to relicense a project permissive when they took it over. It's informed a lot of my opinion on that company, and other encounters have pretty much confirmed this impression.
Google was just trying to be uniform. That I can understand. They’d have accepted Apache as a permissive license, but I used MIT/Expat because it was readable. Apache was not, so I said no. So also their public domain statement was unreadable, I though. They used that font-specific copyleft, I forget its name, at least it is halfway readable.
@jens I am disabled. If I take payment, I have to report it to the Social Security Administration as income, and it creates a possible administrative hassle. And part of my disability is that I am severely obsessive-compulsive, so what would happen is my symptoms would fly through the roof. Which is what was already happening with this whole ordeal.
Just making fonts was bad enough, not only with my OCD, but with my chronic hand pain. And others just not comprehending these facts about me.
@jens I’m happy that they ended up with my fonts and especially the one or two that don’t suck in some important way. The Goudy in particular has proved itself by IMO actually printing well in a volume of ‘free fonts’ (as a ‘contributor’ I got a free copy) and by fake-bolding enough to almost pass as a boldface.
It looks to me as if it is one of the typefaces in Google Play Book’s e-reader. It’s what I have set for reading Ingmar Bergman screenplays in Swedish, should I ever get myself to do it
@jens Die-hard Free Software maximalists thinking they're morally superior to anyone else while ignoring that (1) Free Software has been co-opted by capitalism (most AGPLv3 software these days is released by COSS startups as a form of "don't touch this code with a pole") and (2) Free Software is rooted in libertarianism and therefore Freedom Zero means Free Software can be used to kill, oppress, and do harm in all sorts of ways.
@astrojuanlu@jens
hey, i just read a take on HN saying that the GPL is basically communism
meanwhile permissive licenses are literally libertarian
and i'd love to see some way of preventing software being used for harm inside the software's license
would be a hell of a lawsuit to sue someone using your moral-PL forum software for coordinating illegal actions
@katve@jens What a typical terrible take from the orange site.
I'm not inventing anything new here, people have been talking about the evolution of F/LOSS licenses for a while. Two directions: more commercial restrictions (Polyform licenses, Commons Clause) and more usage restrictions (Do No Harm, Coopyleft, and even the weird "you can't run this in Russia" licenses).
Yes it's a hard problem. Yes it requires skills programmers don't have. Yes these are difficult to enforce.
@astrojuanlu@katve I keep wishing for resources to pay lawyers to draft a halfway decent "communal license".
The basic notion of this is, it should go back to the community.
Which means it must be largely copyleft. But if you find ways to contribute back - which maybe need to be specified by the author - then permissive use is OK.
This creates other problems, of course, such as "how do we track this?"
And look, I know plenty of smart, well-meaning folk who embrace permissive licensing, for non-shitty reasons. I'm not complaining about the people here.
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