Recent searches
Search options
Technology is an amplifier and what Big Tech amplifies is fascism.
You want to amplify the opposite? Then build, raise awareness about, and help fund the opposite:
Small Tech.
@aral I like that you stipulated "share-alike" rather than open source, I think this highlights an important distinction between copyleft licences and permissive licences like BSD and MIT, that, as you put it, "if you benefit from technology that has been put into the commons, you must share back"
#OpenSource #MIT #Copyleft #ShareAlike #GPL
@frechdachs Thanks. I’ve been trying to articulate that as simply as possible for a while now; hopefully it works :)
@frechdachs @aral It’s also the point at which I realise that it’s not a crusade that I will be contributing to, which is a shame because I agree with all of the other points.
I’ve written a lot about why I don’t contribute to copyleft projects over the years, so I won’t repeat it all here, but at a high level, it boils down to two points:
Copyleft project licenses always include some conditions that are easy to accidentally violate. For example, if I compile a GPLv2 project and give a friend a binary so that they don’t have to build it themselves, I’ve violated the license. Will anyone take me to court? Almost certainly not, but now we’re in a land of selective enforcement and everyone needs to talk to lawyers to understand when they are compliant, not compliant but probably fine, or not complaint and at risk. I’ve spent a depressing amount of time talking to lawyers about the GPL and the number of things where the conclusion was that it was a technical violation but it would not be in the interests of anyone with standing to sue to take it to court was depressing.
I also contributed to a GPL’d FSF project where we had strong evidence of a company taking the code and distributing modified versions, but the FSF decided that it was too expensive to enforce the license. This is the worst situation because all of the legal restrictions apply to people acting in good faith but not to others because the cost of enforcement is too high.
More importantly, forcing people to cooperate via legal threat never works. People contribute changes to permissively licensed projects because they understand the value of the commons. I’ve seen far more proprietary software written as a result of the GPL than Free Software. Even small companies would rather reimplement something in house than understand the GPL in all of its intricate corner cases and so we end up with them providing no benefit to the commons. In contrast, the evolution I’ve seen many times with permissive software is as follows:
- They take the code and maintain their own fork. Yay, the commons gives us free stuff!
- They implement a new feature in their own fork. Yay, building on the commons lets us differentiate!
- Upstream implements the same feature but a different way. Oh, private stuff on top of the commons is costing us,
- They reevaluate how much of a competitive advantage they actually get. Hmm, maybe out 2% addition is not actually as valuable as we thought it was.
- They developed their next new feature upstream and strive to have as small a diff as possible in house.
After step five, they are eager and willing contributors to the open ecosystem. With GPL’d projects, this doesn’t happen. They either do an in-house rewrite or they take GPL’d code and have compliance people deal with upstream and regard the license as a cost centre.
There are exceptions to this, but they tend to be projects that already grew to the size where a proprietary reimplementation is not feasible, such as Linux (and, even then, the level of grudging compliance from phone vendors, for example, shows you how little the GPL is actually helping).
@david_chisnall @frechdachs “Share alike” is not a complex concept. It just so happens to be incompatible with capitalism and the privatisation and hoarding that goes with it.
Small Tech isn’t concerned with the needs of corporations and neither is it concerned with achieving vertical scale. And we’re not going around burning every permissive license we find either. Small Tech is its own thing and will evolve in its own way. Slowly. At human scale. Sharing as we go.
@aral @frechdachs It’s not a complex concept, it’s a complex thing to enshrine in legalese. And when you do, you are giving power to lawyers and people who can afford to pay lawyers, not to individuals.
If you want to peg a small tech thing to copyleft, that’s your choice. As someone who has written and released a few hundred thousand lines of code under permissive license, I won’t be joining in. I’ve seen people adopt the position that you are taking (that copyleft is the only true way) and it almost never achieves the goals that are stated.
You’re starting by saying that your licensing ideology is more pure than that of many successful projects. I don’t know how you expect that to build an inclusive environment.
@david_chisnall @frechdachs Here’s all I’m doing: I’m saying “dear corporation, you see this thing that I’ve spent the last however many years of my life working on? You can’t take it and enclose it. You can’t privatise it. I mean, you can, and, if you did, I’d likely not be able to afford to pursue you legally but I could maybe do so in the court of public opinion.”
At the very least, I’m making my intent crystal clear.
It’s not an attempt at purity or perfection. Neither exist.
@david_chisnall @aral @frechdachs
license is the incentives instrument.
It looks like we need to communicate a mechanism without a chance of people jumping into heavy words like "ideology".
It is consistency: I create good thing, you do same, please-incentive in a form of letting you use this thing.
license is the incentives instrument.
It’s not a good one. You don’t change behaviour in a society by passing laws, you change behaviours and then codify them in laws to make sure that you can deal with people who do not comply.
It looks like we need to communicate a mechanism without a chance of people jumping into heavy words like "ideology".
Having agency over the machines that operate key things in your life is intrinsically ideological. It’s an ideology that I happen to subscribe to. I just don’t think (based on a couple of decades of working in the field and observing numerous communities that have worked in this space) that trying to enforce it with licensing works.
The biggest problem is that most FOSS targets developers. It’s hard to convince people of the value of something in a world where they are second class citizens. This is why we focused on end-user programming in Étoilé.
It is consistency: I create good thing, you do same, please-incentive in a form of letting you use this thing
Here’s the problem. Your adversary can pay a lot of lawyers. So you write something like the GPL, and people discover loopholes. For example, you can run hosted things and not distribute binaries, so no GPL issues. Or you can ship a binary-only kernel module that are not derived works of the kernel, linked with a shim (as NVIDIA does) and require people to download them and install them. And, as a side effect, you discover that it makes it hard for people who maintain open-source package repos. To comply with the license, they need to keep copies of the source code around for a long time. Of course, this doesn’t matter to big corporations who can afford TBs of disk space as a rounding error.
So then you create a newer license like the GPLv3 that eliminates the retention problem. Only now it isn’t compatible with the old license, and some key libraries (e.g. libpoppler, which was derived from the xpdf codebase, and was the only open source PDF renderer) are incompatible with anything under the new license, so you have to spend more time and effort reimplementing them. And now you’ve closed the Tivoisation loophole, but not the hosted service one.
So now you create an even more restrictive license, the AGPL. Unlike other F/OSS licenses, this isn’t simply a distribution license. The GPL is explicit that you don’t have to accept it if you don’t distribute derived works, but AGPL requires you to accept it even for local modification. So it doesn’t actually meet your own definition of Free Software, but you go through some mental gymnastics and retcon a definition so it works.
Only unfortunately AGPL, like GPL and LGPL before it, encoded a C/UNIX linkage model in legalese accidentally. So now a big corporation writes a big proprietary back-end service that exposes an RPC interface. And they add a tiny shim to the AGPL’d system that talks this interface. And they release that shim, and anyone who implements the same interface can use it. Except their implementation is a huge piece of proprietary software.
So, after all of this, you’ve made individuals and small businesses have to care a lot about licenses. They’ve had to learn a lot about IP law or hire lawyers. The licenses are now so complicated that no lawyer is actually willing to make definitive statements about them, so the only people who are safe using the software are ones that can massive outspend the copyright owners if it ever goes to court (i.e. big companies) and big companies have paid lawyers to come up with work arounds and are still building proprietary extensions that lock users into their platforms.
@david_chisnall
Let me focus on this statement:
"Having agency over the machines that operate key things in your life is intrinsically ideological. "
Counter example, Ukrainians are given weapons that they can't use properly. It is not ideology. It is about survival.
@david_chisnall
License is not a law. It is an instrument between two parties. That's it. Not ideal instrument. Ya. But without any instruments, we are naked, vulnerably naked.
@david_chisnall
For, quote: "So, after all of this, you’ve made individuals and small businesses have to care a lot about licenses."
?
I personally was made to care about licenses when I bought a set of three CD's from Borland. Wrote an app. And this software told me I can't package my own work to get it to others.
And, in the same period, MS was absorbing security fixes into Windows of network stack that was BSD/MIT borrowed/used. And yes, it was a time of heavy fud towards linux from MS. 
@david_chisnall @frechdachs @aral
may be gpl-style stuff is working. Not on a precise double entry accounting level, but more like a directing star.
Linux vs BSD is a great historical example. It isn't about suing people, more about long term trend.
@mikalai @frechdachs @aral Linux vs BSD is not a good case to generalise from because the AT&T vs UCB lawsuit delayed the x86 port of BSD until Linux was established.
And, in spite of the fact that Linux is a behemoth that has backing from enormous companies, engagement from smaller companies is often reluctant and forced only by the license.
@david_chisnall I think you raise some pretty valid points. I think, we are both more or less in agreement in the value of the commons, but what the best vehicle for this is, permissive or copyleft is somewhat in dispute. I do think it is positive that in your experience, permissive licences are successful in this.
I think we can't deny (not accusing you of this in this case) that free software licences are, by their own nature, ideological; with a key difference being: Is their a requirement that modifications can not be hidden, and must return to the commons. Undoubtedly, this has thus has played a role in the success of the linux kernel; in the same way the BSD approach has not (i.e Apples opaque contributions to BSD).
I think your point of "forcing people to cooperate via legal threat never works" is an interesting one, unfortunately, I think it *does* work but to the benefit of large corporations to whom the expense of enforcing comes at the expense of those that can not. Ideologically speaking though, copyleft licences (and to a lesser extent permissive licences) as you have eluded to, are depended on a legal system; ideologically I agree with German Pirate Party's copyright policy but if it were implemented here, It would destroy copyleft licences. It's certainly more nuanced.
Corporate business period amplifies fascism. By definition and law, every single one is controlled by a dictator or oligarchy. Bosses' retort to dissent: "this ain't a democracy, buddy". Nope, it really ain't.
Perhaps if we want true democracies we must overhaul our economies to remove the dictatorships festering right under our noses?
@aral this ought to be the future, beyond tech. In every area of life now we have global conglomerates, giving us ever less choice, regional variation or diversity of any kind. More variety. More choice. More small!