this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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And there is nothing wrong with folks choosing such licences—especially if trying to get paid or not exploited.
No, these licenses are problematic. Fundamentally, it is proprietary software, and restricts me from full ownership and control over my computer.
No derivatives prevents me from modifying the program and maintaining the control I am owed to have over my device. Every bit of proprietary code is a percentage of my computer that is no longer truly mine.
No commercial usage is a continium fallacy. Is my blog commercial, because I advertise my resume on it? Is retroarch* commercial, because they have a patreon and get paid? Are "nonprofits" not commercial, since they claim to not want to make a profit? Or are only registered businesses commercial?
The correct solution to maintain softare freedom is for governments to extract money from the entities that profit the most off of free software, and use those taxes to fund free software. Germany is kind of doing this with their sovreign tech fund.
*Fuck the retroarch devs btw. Did a little digging, they seem to have been very problematic, and ran multiple harassment campaigns.
Some of these license are very clear about what is commericial. Some leave it to be ambiguous for the sake of allowing a case by case determination. The goal is often to help workers & the commons—say you as an individual are free to use it for, or others for places where folks have equal pay or say, or less than 10 seats. To say that since a software license says Amazon can’t use this but you can means it’s all proprietary means you are either Amazon or a goober to think these are equivalent. Something something baby out with the water fallacy [^1].
I am not sure reliance on the state is the best way, but it would be interesting to see the results.
What’s wild is the banshees here rarely acknowledge how AGPL works similar to these now adding restrictions instead of laying out what you can do, but daddy OSI approved it so it must be good.
1: Wikipedia
The license chosen in this article is the Creative Commons license, which is not a code license, but instead one intended for art. On their own page, they acknowledge the difficulty with categorizing commercial vs non-commercial usecases:
"You must share source code of this service with your users" is not really an actual restriction on who can use the software and who can use it.
Fuck the OSI. They've done more harm to free software than any other organization. In the recent controversy with redis and SSPL, they refused to acknowledge the actual problem of the SSPL license, that it was unusable due to requiring all "software used to deploy this software" being open source. Does that mean that people who deploy software on Windows have to cough up the source code for Windows? What about Intel Management Engine, the proprietary bit of code in every single Intel CPU. Redis moved to a dual license with that a proprietary license. An unusable license... and a proprietary license = proprietary software. But instead, the OSI whined that the problems with the SSPL was that it would "restrict usage" because people have to share more source code. The OSI, and open source, have always been corporate entities that unsurp free software. Just look at their sponsors page and see who supports them: Amazon, Google, Intel, Microsoft...
You are moving the goalposts. I argued against a license that restricts derivatives and commercial use. You are now defending licenses that target specific entities and seek to remain open to workers and the commons. A license that restricts derivatives is not this.
To be blunt, I would be okay with a license that specifically restricts retroarch devs from making derivatives, and I would find it funny af. I think that was what the Duckstation dev was going for with the noncommercial and no derivatives (since retroarch maintains forks of software in order to add it as cores), but I'm frustrated at what is essentially a shift to a proprietary license instead.
Although such a hypothetical license that targets the retroarch developers would not be approved by the OSI or the Free Software institutions, I don't really care. Racists don't get rights.
Why are you talking about Creative Commons? Everyone knows this isn’t for code (hence Fedora kicking out CC0 code) & everyone knows NC has a loose definition (& good intentions). There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source. These have their flaws—specifically the incompatibility with free software—but the heart is in the right place in trying to address the exploitation; I encourage the research & development of licenses in these spaces to help the commons. I, as a non-corporation, wish to defend not shame developers from choosing non-‘free’ licenses in these & similar categories for their software. This defense of alternative licensing isn’t moving a goalpost & always was the primary premise.
Because (from the article):
Yeah. It's not supposed to be for code. Didn't stop the Duckstation developer.
I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.
I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the "good" restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google's profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.
Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. "Divide and conquer". My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and... you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.
And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.
No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don't really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.
Duckstation license choice of CC BY-NC-ND is dumb for software for a number of reason—wouldn’t argue that. But there are software licenses in a similar vein, inspired by CC NC but actually for, ya know, software, that do what they want without being fundamentally problematic—and these were the “such licenses” I was talking about the whole time & should be tested/trialed. I think you misunderstood my phrasing.
No modification is a bummer, but I could argue for in either direction more strongly a) some source you can modify but you can’t contribute (like Microsoft’s closed-off Language Server Protocol) which is different level of restriction that flies in the spirit of having a open license making ‘modification’ not open enough since you can’t really get all downstream implementations to support your fork or b) I would be happier being able to see the code such as the encryption used that would be better than nothing (like whatever Discord is trying to tell users it’s definitely-not-back-doored E2EE setup is… trust us). “ND” is better than nothing & imperfect, but it can be seen as a spectrum.
CC0 is awful for code. I didn't understand why until reading this https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2012-February/001431.html (you can click the thread button to see the full thread as well).
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.en#limitations
The only license/declaration approved by both the FSF and OSI for putting something into the public domain while having a permissive fallback license (for jurisdictions without public domain) is the Unlicense. If you know of others please let me know.
I'd disagree with you there somewhat. It was all discussed in the mailing list. https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2018-October/thread.html#3603
I've dug through this and the discussion for SSPLv2 a bit because I used to disagree with their decision. The criticism is that it accomplishes the alleged goal of discrimination against SaaS providers specifically by doing what you're saying.
I'll check my notes some more, I could've sworn I had a link to an email specifically saying as much but I can't find it right now. I'll poke around and see if I can find it.
I guess it's better than not providing any source code. What's wrong is calling it "open source" when it isn't.
VVVVVV and Anodyne are some examples of "source available" games.
Not what I am arguing, but we do have two issues: 1) naming/branding for these types of licenses 2) FOSS banshees acting like these licenses aren’t acceptable & the whole idea is binary good or evil
As long as we don't call them free, libre, or open source I don't care. We shouldn't make the terminology any more confusing for those.
There’s limited vocab to choose from & source available isn’t an appealing one
It doesn't really roll off the tongue, I get it, but it's the best and most widely used term for software whose source is available to view but not modify and/or redistribute.
Yeah, it definitely is more appealing from a marketing perspective.
I do understand why some projects might wanna use the term, it's to their advantage to be associated with "open source" even if the source code itself has a proprietary license.
The problem is that then it makes it harder / more confusing to check for actually openly licensed code, since then it's not clear what term to use. Already "free software" can be confused with "free as in free beer".
Right. We want clear labels else they become meaningless like “boost immune system”. There probably is something that can fix the phrasing when someone finds it, but it also must not be poisoned by those going too hard into free software as a lifestyle or corporations looking to circumvent the premise. What it should be called tho, I don’t know.