cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62536902
The ongoing discussions about age-verification and changes in Free and Open-Source Software and GNU Linux and related OSs made me realize a gross misunderstanding on my part. I think many other users may have the same misunderstanding (seeing many comments using the word “traitors”), and it’s important that we become aware of it. We must understand that using or saying “FOSS” or “Linux” does not automatically mean to stand up for human rights like privacy, for the community, against corporations, and similar goals and values.
If we read the comments in those age-verification discussions we can see that many developers and possibly also users make statements like “the developers have no obligation towards the community”, “the law is the law, no matter what the community wants”, “we must comply”, and similar. It’s important to realize that many developers work on FOSS not out of consideration for the community, or for human rights, or against corporations. For them it’s just one kind of software development. We may have projects that are FOSS and pro-corporations or pro-surveillance. The “F” in FOSS stands for freedom to modify and distribute the software by/to anyone in the community. It doesn’t stand for “software that promotes / stands up for general human freedom and human rights". But of course there are also developers that work with FOSS because of such values.
So for anyone who, like me, wants to use and promote software as an assertion of, and a stand for, human rights and against corporations, it’s necessary not to stop at “FOSS” or “Linux” but apply more scrutiny and more careful choices. Probably it’s always been like this, but the present times require extra awareness.
I wish there was an acronym or other word that made this moral aspect of some FOSS development clear. This would help users to recognize software projects that share their values, and also those FOSS developers who do work for those values. Is there such a term already out there?
Evil people already don’t respect licenses. Tacking on the term no evil people isn’t going to fix that. It’s already hard enough for most GPL Etc coders to enforce their licenses. Giving of their very limited resources to create the code in the first place, and receiving no resources back from the code in general. The legal process is expensive painful and time-consuming by design.
All this will do is create more Hoops to jump through or ignore at best. And possibly incentivize people not to contribute or use if they feel the work could be yanked up from under them for arbitrary and capricious reasons.
Whoa I just had a great idea to stop gun violence: just write “don’t shoot people” on guns and you’re good
Make sure to always salute the true unsung heroes of gun safety, those brave “weapon free zone” signs holding the line and protecting every school child’s safety 24/7/365!
*falcon noises dubbed over footage of a bald eagle*
If just more schools had that sign, we wouldn’t have so many school shootings…
Sure, evil people already don’t respect licenses, but also ATM we don’t even have a legal framework to take the fight to them. With an Ethical Use of Software license, we would (getting us the actual power to use that legal framework is left an exercise to the political reader).
The thing is the law is often not about Justice. And I don’t think either of us are lawyers. But I don’t think you quite understand the difficulty legally of what you’re proposing. And how I mentioned elsewhere that it is much more likely to hurt the people you would rather see helped than the people you want it to. We just have to sort of do our thing for the most part and help those we want to help. And just worry after the fact about those that have wronged us and need to be punished.
Open source as we know it wouldn’t really exist with that sort of specificity and pettiness in exclusion. Overall I think the fact that we have it even if people we would rather not have, do as well. Is the better than not.