[License-discuss] What should fit in a FOSS license?

[Chris Travers]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 03:31 Russell McOrmond <russellmcormond at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Wed, Mar 11, 2020 at 3:34 PM Josh Berkus <josh at berkus.org> wrote:
>
>> But I'm talking about going beyond that -- using the Vaccine License to
>> explain why we have OSD 5 in the first place, because devs under 40 do
>> not believe in the OSD.  It needs to be explained. Stay tuned.
>>
>
> I think we have recently seen examples of devs over 40 who don't
> understand the reasons behind the OSD, whether from a political/rights
> perspective or a more practical software engineering/adoption perspective.
> I don't think this is strictly a matter of age.
>

There are also huge regional variations on this just as there are huge
regional variations on what the nature or limits of human right or freedom
actually is.

A great example of something that the ESL would pose a problem for is
whether hard core pornography is free speech and therefore whether ISPs in
places that have laws requiring blocking suck can use software with a human
rights clause.  Certainly it is not the place of a few Americans to define
these things for the world.  And freedom that demands agreement is no
freedom at all.

>
>
> Understanding the history of the problems Free Software and then later
> Open Source were created to try to solve, and the compromises that already
> happened, are critical for understanding what types of changes will be
> acceptable and what is going to be recognised as in opposition.
>

Computers allow us to make more mistakes faster and on a larger scale than
ever before.  For this reason I find history of computing tends to be a
more compressed social history than in any other field.  I find it
fascinating that this organization learns the same lesson the European
Charter of Fundamental Rights reflects regarding experience of fascism or
Rosa Luxemburg noted as errors in Lenninism.

>
> It was already a compromise for those of us who were involved in Free
> Software movement for human rights/freedoms (freedom from excessive control
> by software copyright owners, and later software patent owners when that
> harmful concept was invented) reasons were sceptical of the more
> politics-neutral "Open Source" language.  There was a need to explain to us
> why nothing of the underlying freedom goals was lost in the adoption of the
> marketing term "Open Source" to describe essentially the same thing in a
> much more business/success friendly manner.  The licenses would be the
> same, with the criteria for Open Source being based on the Debian Free
> Software Guidelines (DFSG), even if the organisations created to manage the
> important brands (FSF and OSI) might be a different stages of approval
> processes.
>

This distinction matters though a lot but not necessarily in straight
forward ways.  The GPL seems more compatible with big business Capitalism
than the BSD license which may be why corporations that want to retain
ownership and control of their intellectual property choose the GPL family
of licenses.  My view is that the GPL manifests the attitude that "I bought
this and therefore I have a freedom to tinker as a fundamental right."  The
BSD type license otoh has a view that "you have a right to produce and I
have a right to learn  from your experience."

>
>
>
> I became a convert -- until recently I became sceptical again as people
> started talking about "being a little bit more open" as being a relevant
> goal of Open Source.   If Open Source becomes something entirely different
> than Free Software, and the rights/freedom public policy goals are lost,
> then we'll splinter into those different camps and I believe that success
> for anyone will go out the door.
>

I guess I see Free Software as one camp.  And I see Open Source as a forum
for different camps to collaborate on issues of common good in the hopes of
building commonality in productive culture.  There is greater
transformative power in such collaboration than there is in struggle.

>
> --
> Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
>
> "The government, lobbied by legacy copyright holders and hardware
> manufacturers, can pry my camcorder, computer, home theatre, or portable
> media player from my cold dead hands!" http://c11.ca/own
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