I agree from a technical perspective. For political actors, on the other hand, they use the publicity of these security flaws to smear OSS from executives, policy makers and the general public.
Just FYI, I’ve worked on a big Brazilian state owned tech company and I heard multiple times from top executives sponsored by politicians of how closed source is better for security because the flaws aren’t apparent, or because only employees of said company could touch the code base. We devs all knew that was all bullshit, but they use this kind of justification to the wide public in order to justify their shady business deals.
Its dialectics in the end. On one hand you have the improved security through transparency, the objective reduction in bad actors to hide malicious code and the general ability for the masses to access key assets for use and reproduction. On the other hand companies and bad actors use it in a demagogic way to discredit open source.
It is the same as cuba, china and the ussr were (or are in some cases) backwards or different from the west. they have always been objectively better. the west used their backwardness to point fingers and brainwash the masses.
this does not make the states i just mention bad or should tell them to do anything different. it tells you that abusers will always abuse by any means they can. capitalism has the economics of a cancer cell (i love that quote) and it does not have morals, although it uses morals a lot.
From a purely amoral perspective, I have benefits from foss code being foss and from some asshole being less able to put their shit in there without my knowledge and that is all beneficial to me.
There is no world in where foss is a bad idea. if anything, foss is still too forgiving in exploitative measures as in should not be allowed to extract surplus value at all.
To drive this even further, I suggest a marxist license that allows software to be used only in a non extractionary manner. if a software uses that license, they must maintain equal treatment and payment of all profits towards the workers and none towards owners and such. of course, same as gpl the license must be viral and unchangeable.
I think the problem is that a ton of Foss people have internalized that success=getting corpos to use your software. Even Foss enthusiasts who don’t have that as their personal goal will mostly look for the opinions of Foss personalities who have succeeded in this way.
You basically have to be addicted to getting exploited for this to work as a volunteer Foss maintainer.
Marxist-GPL is a dead end imho. If you don’t want corporate adoption, just don’t put a license on it. Debian users might get annoyed but mostly people shouldn’t really care about Foss licenses on small projects anyway, no maintainer is going to sue you. Best course of action is imho whatever FFmpeg is doing and turn it up a notch. Be as rude and demanding as possible to corpos that are depending on your software.
Oh the future of your billion dollar corporation depends on a vulnerability in my little project getting patched? Pay up.
They might fork you, at least they are doing something for their money now. And they are in too deep to fork and maintain everything themselves.
I see your point, yet I think that it is not looking at the obvious existence of the gpl (or agpl i think) which essentially means you cant make money off of it and must license derivatives the same way. Going the marxist way would mean massively promoting cooperatives. I think there is a place for it. I might make it myself just to prove it can be done and then see what it does.
I just don’t think that written code equals worker power. Ongoing development and maintainance does.
You put a bunch of clauses in your license, how are you enforcing it. You have to refer to the bourgeois legal system. I’m not completely opposed to it, just seems fairly impractical. It isn’t my goal in life to be caught up in a decades spanning lawsuit to be eventually awarded 100k in damages (that’s assuming I got everything right).
Thats essentially defeatism. Using this or that license makes absoputely no difference in your daily routine but it will make a difference for one company that will not use your software for exploitative purposes and will especially encourage cooperatives and singletons to use your software.
Its the same as eating no meat. It makes absolutely zero difference but you will probably (with much more effort than using a marxist license) create one or two more vegetarians or vegans.
Just because something does not have the deciding effect does not mean one should not do it. It is called having principles. Like being in a union or a political party.
The most curious fact in this is that closed source helps governments hide backdoors. That is infinitely harder in foss.
exactly
I agree from a technical perspective. For political actors, on the other hand, they use the publicity of these security flaws to smear OSS from executives, policy makers and the general public.
Just FYI, I’ve worked on a big Brazilian state owned tech company and I heard multiple times from top executives sponsored by politicians of how closed source is better for security because the flaws aren’t apparent, or because only employees of said company could touch the code base. We devs all knew that was all bullshit, but they use this kind of justification to the wide public in order to justify their shady business deals.
Its dialectics in the end. On one hand you have the improved security through transparency, the objective reduction in bad actors to hide malicious code and the general ability for the masses to access key assets for use and reproduction. On the other hand companies and bad actors use it in a demagogic way to discredit open source.
It is the same as cuba, china and the ussr were (or are in some cases) backwards or different from the west. they have always been objectively better. the west used their backwardness to point fingers and brainwash the masses.
this does not make the states i just mention bad or should tell them to do anything different. it tells you that abusers will always abuse by any means they can. capitalism has the economics of a cancer cell (i love that quote) and it does not have morals, although it uses morals a lot.
From a purely amoral perspective, I have benefits from foss code being foss and from some asshole being less able to put their shit in there without my knowledge and that is all beneficial to me.
There is no world in where foss is a bad idea. if anything, foss is still too forgiving in exploitative measures as in should not be allowed to extract surplus value at all.
To drive this even further, I suggest a marxist license that allows software to be used only in a non extractionary manner. if a software uses that license, they must maintain equal treatment and payment of all profits towards the workers and none towards owners and such. of course, same as gpl the license must be viral and unchangeable.
Can someone please make a marxist gpl? PLEASE!
I think the problem is that a ton of Foss people have internalized that success=getting corpos to use your software. Even Foss enthusiasts who don’t have that as their personal goal will mostly look for the opinions of Foss personalities who have succeeded in this way.
You basically have to be addicted to getting exploited for this to work as a volunteer Foss maintainer.
Marxist-GPL is a dead end imho. If you don’t want corporate adoption, just don’t put a license on it. Debian users might get annoyed but mostly people shouldn’t really care about Foss licenses on small projects anyway, no maintainer is going to sue you. Best course of action is imho whatever FFmpeg is doing and turn it up a notch. Be as rude and demanding as possible to corpos that are depending on your software.
They might fork you, at least they are doing something for their money now. And they are in too deep to fork and maintain everything themselves.
I see your point, yet I think that it is not looking at the obvious existence of the gpl (or agpl i think) which essentially means you cant make money off of it and must license derivatives the same way. Going the marxist way would mean massively promoting cooperatives. I think there is a place for it. I might make it myself just to prove it can be done and then see what it does.
I just don’t think that written code equals worker power. Ongoing development and maintainance does.
You put a bunch of clauses in your license, how are you enforcing it. You have to refer to the bourgeois legal system. I’m not completely opposed to it, just seems fairly impractical. It isn’t my goal in life to be caught up in a decades spanning lawsuit to be eventually awarded 100k in damages (that’s assuming I got everything right).
Thats essentially defeatism. Using this or that license makes absoputely no difference in your daily routine but it will make a difference for one company that will not use your software for exploitative purposes and will especially encourage cooperatives and singletons to use your software.
Its the same as eating no meat. It makes absolutely zero difference but you will probably (with much more effort than using a marxist license) create one or two more vegetarians or vegans.
Just because something does not have the deciding effect does not mean one should not do it. It is called having principles. Like being in a union or a political party.
Edit: Here it is. I found this some months ago but forgot that its there. https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License
I’d rather have orgs/people that take themselves seriously enough to care about licenses contact me personally.