Follow

I am anti-foss by the way. 

And yet I use it all the time, but we could strive for something better. I would simply not create a permission slip for evil industrial complexes to use my work, for example.

I think the anti-foss people who want monetary compensation for their work being "stolen" and focus on that instead of harm it could be enabling have a misguided critique.

And no, I don't think the AGPL is enough to ward off bad usage in the long term (companies will eventually lose their legal superstitions and find ways of using AGPL'd software for evil).

Maybe some people think nothing they author is ever truly fit for evil? I think evil shitheads are more imaginative than you give them credit.

If you can stipulate usage restrictions you can just explicitly disallow enabling dystopian bullshit while keeping the source available and requiring reciprocity from anyone allowed to participate. Ethical open source licensing is in early stages, but authors who know their work is used in killer robots already could stipulate that they just do not offer the software under that license to specific entities?

User freedom over general human well-being, the prioritization of geek rights over someone being hunted for being from the wrong ethnic group at the wrong end of a GPL'd bomb sight. That's what bothers me about how the OSI and the FSF define the limits of open source. It is for nerds first, general human welfare might be a side-effect. I think it should be a pure function for good. I'm sick of the libertarian capitalist ideology aspect of FOSS culture, the whole "Fuck you, I've got mine".

Mass surveillance and military industrial complexes have been built atop tools that should be put to work bettering the world instead and that's fucked up. That's not "software libre", that's an open software support stack for oppression.

· Edited · · Tusky · 0 · 0 · 1
Sign in to participate in the conversation
Pixietown

Small server part of the pixie.town infrastructure. Registration is closed.