if you're publishing open source code, your enemies will use it. personal enemies, political enemies, class enemies. they will use it and derive benefit from it and there is nothing you can do to stop it. (no, licenses aren't it.)
i think that if you're not ready for this you should probably not publish open source code
@whitequark the most you can do is make it inconvenient for actors following the rules (e.g. publishing as OSL or whatever other license that's banned). but past that, shits public ;-;
just like the only laws effectively enforced against drivers are physics, the only laws effectively enforced against software users are "not having the thing to begin with"
@leftpaddotpy yeah. with drivers it's somewhat more effective than with software because cars are big and physical and have license plates and we have cameras everywhere; in the US there's a near-total lack of will to enforce traffic law violations by drivers, elsewhere it's not as bad
@leftpaddotpy@whitequark I like to say that "licenses only stop the honest people" - a short phrasing I came up with after observing some game modding scenes.
@whitequark I've seen a lot of projects start off as open source under GPL only for the developer to sadly make the project proprietary and pair their decision with a rant decrying FOSS.
I won't point any fingers but im sure most people know of some examples.
@whitequark Yes, free software is free for everyone to examine the source code of, including your enemies. However, making a program proprietary could be seen as ensuring your enemies have already won, as nobody else will have access to the source code. I would personally prefer to err on the side of the greater benefit to humanity and that's to publish under a free software license when I can.
@skquinn the recent arguments assert that making certain types of programs ("AI", usually) is a net harm to humanity, and so making them open source is deepening the harm
@whitequark If they are available as free software, at least people can understand how they work and modify them as desired (freedoms 0 and 1). I don't see how this could be perceived as deepening the harm. The proprietary model where these freedoms are not present could only be worse.
@skquinn you don't see how freedom 0 (the freedom to unrestricted use) can be seen as harmful if the use it enables is primarily e.g. impersonation, misinformation, propaganda, and so on? (which is the argument against wide availability of AI-style tools)
@whitequark I'd say regulating what software does, from a computing freedom/free software point of view, is outside the scope of licensing. There are many programs released as free software which can be misused and abused for immoral, unethical, and unlawful ends. The Unabomber could have used Emacs or Vim to write his manifesto, for example (and for all I know maybe he did).
also I oppose calling such licenses "open source"; it being possible to use OSS for evil ends is a feature of OSS that is inextricable from it and that made OSS what it is
@whitequark Agreed, I just don't know what else to call "software that provides source code but doesn't provide other essential freedoms."
(And to be clear, I know that they can't enforce it - when I said, "I would love to know," I meant it like, "it would be entertaining to hear them try to explain it.")
@whitequark This is one reason I tend to use permissive licenses (MIT/Apache2). My goal with my projects is to share the work so others can take it and run with it if they want (in general I'm not looking to become some kind of long-term maintainer of things), and since bad actors will do whatever they want in complete disregard for any license (and trying to enforce compliance is costly, time consuming, and even more of a bother), so mightI as well make things simple for people who play nice.
@swetland@whitequark Interestingly, I would have had the exact opposite reasoning. I don't write code but I use a lot of open source apps and I tend to see copyleft licences as a sign of goodwill from the maintainers, that they won't change the licence to monopolize the work of the community, and that they instead hope to keep this work reusable for the others. Obviously those clauses can always be violated, but they seem to work as a foundation of trust among well-intentioned actors, that all of their efforts will go towards contributing to the digital commons. A bit idealistic perhaps, but I like the political stance that copyleft implies.
@whitequark@ailepet@swetland I see it as a way to state social expectations and tell corposcum they're unwanted.
There is very little that practically allows for enforcing those expectations (especially when pseudonymous/anonymous), but the act of willfully violating them when they're set explicitly sends a message to all & sundry.
one of the early Glasgow Interface Explorer prototypes is in the hands of someone i lived with who hit me for her own satisfaction, and she's likely using it, and there's nothing I can do about it
besides making my peace with it and meditating on what open-source software and hardware mean to me
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