[License-discuss] How can we as a community help empower authors outside license agreements?

[Mark Atwood]

> But I've also seen on multiple occasions that attorneys are just as creative and solution-minded as engineers, if not more, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were ways to pull this off.

IOW, "nerd harder".

No.

Some people here seem to think that "ethical licenses" solve a problem that needs solving. Not everyone who otherwise spent time/labor/blood/treasure solving the open source problem agrees. Many many people agree that open source is not the forum or mechanism for solving other problems that other people think are important.

The purpose of open source, open source licenses, the open source community, and the OSI are to solve the "proprietary software hoarding" problem / "why cant we collaborate together on software development together" problem. Period.

I mean, if I was asked to name problems that *I* want to be solved with intellectual property law, I would name data accountability, personal privacy, documentation of protocols, standards compliance, death to patent trolls, and disengagement from the patent wars. But even those probably are not best solved by forcing a new meaning on "open source".

There are important social problems to be be argued about, and then possibly solved. But not using the labor that was invested in solving THIS problem, and certainly not by putting this solved problem at risk. Go build those various "community to empower authors" communities... elsewhere.


Mark Atwood <atwoodm at amazon.com>
keybase.io/fallenpegasus
+1-206-604-2198
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