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Please do avoid attaching points of view to any specific
characteristic of a group or individual, whether it's gender, age,
nationality, ethnicity, religion, hair color, or Star Wars/Star
Trek. It's an easy way to offend someone you didn't mean to offend
and then any valid point you hoped to make will be missed entirely.<br>
<br>
Just some other thoughts: <br>
<br>
A lot of idioms, metaphors and slang are offensive, but we don't
realize it because we're so used to them. They are also often
confusing to a speaker of a different native language. Words may
also have different degrees of offensiveness depending on the
culture. As plain, non-rhetorical English as you can manage will the
be easiest for everyone to understand and the least likely to
unintentionally offend. <br>
<br>
Pam<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-signature">Pamela Chestek<br>
Chair, License Review Committee<br>
Open Source Initiative<br>
<br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 3/12/2020 12:48 PM, Russell McOrmond
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAGi9AuUuB2HhNSTfZfcKXjOqdEW24Hp5kVCrWg_aQRqmJA3h9Q@mail.gmail.com">
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<div dir="ltr">On Thu, Mar 12, 2020 at 11:30 AM Gil Yehuda via
License-discuss <<a
href="mailto:license-discuss@lists.opensource.org"
moz-do-not-send="true">license-discuss@lists.opensource.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid
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<div dir="ltr">If you strip away dog whistling and
provocative terms that often bring out less productive
discussions, there is something similar here to other
"source-available but restricted" ideas. The generic shape
of the argument in simplified form:
<div><br>
<div>
<div>1. I created this code.</div>
<div>2. I seek to display it for others to see.
Perhaps comment, improve, or at least recognize me
for it.</div>
<div>3. I seek to allow many people to use this code
too.</div>
<div>4. For a particular set of reasons, I don't want
some people or entities to use my code.</div>
<div>5. I want people who can use my code to be unable
to circumvent my restriction in #4.</div>
<div>6. I might have other statements I want to make
that are preserved in the project.</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
<br>
I wish we could strip away the word "ethical" which is the
core provocative term pervading the less productive parts of
the discussion.</div>
<div><br>
<br>
</div>
<div>For the friction-less collaboration of Open Source to
work, #4, #5 and #6 can't exist. As soon as they do, you
then have something that creates much more friction for
collaboration than the license proliferation problem often
discussed in these forums. To avoid "offending" people, and
being claimed to be "unethical", you need to learn the
personal politics and personal interpretation of political
language of all the authors (or most often, copyright and
patent holders and employers often take control away from
the actual authors). That simply doesn't scale, so makes
the whole point of being open pointless from a collaboration
perspective.</div>
<div><br>
The way Open Source works is that is is *DELIBERATELY* not
author centric. It is not an accident, or something that
could be reworded in the OSD to "fix". Trying to create
something that is author centric, regardless of the policy
that any individual author may wish to promote, is obviously
going to be incomparable.<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>The concept of proprietary software has existed since the
1970's or 80's, depending on your jurisdiction, when
software not printed on paper (IE: in books) became clearly
covered by copyright law. It is nothing new, nor is the
concept of "freeware" where the copyright holder don't
charge royalties for the software and yet have other
restrictions of interest to the copyright holder. This has
included from the beginning proprietary software that is
distributed with source code, as availability of source code
is a separate concept from whether it is proprietary or not
(in fact, in the early days distributing binaries was
largely useless as the only way to run software on your
particular hardware was often to compile it on that
machine).</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>What was new was the Free Software and later Open Source
response, which was to deliberately move away from the
author-centric (or rather, copyright and later patent-holder
centric) legal framework that was growing. That proprietary
legal framework has been ongoing, and copyright/patent/etc
holders are getting more and more powerful every day to the
detriment of the rest of society.<br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
To turn around and suggest that Free Software and Open
Source software would somehow be "better" if we became more
proprietary (= author centric) is to miss the entire point.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>What the Microsoft Github generation some seem to want to
talk about is the same thing that other proprietary authors
have wanted for generations now. It is unfortunate that
they want to harness the positive brand recognition of "Open
Source" to do something which predates and was deliberately
rejected by those who founded "Open Source".</div>
<div><br>
<br>
I see an unfortunate trademark dispute in the future, as it
is obviously harmful for this proprietary (= author centric)
software group to create confusion about what open source
(collaborative community, software user, computer owner,
society, etc centric) is.<br>
<br>
</div>
<div>-- <br>
</div>
</div>
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <<a
href="http://www.flora.ca/" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://www.flora.ca/</a>><br>
<br>
"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!" <a href="http://c11.ca/own" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">http://c11.ca/own</a></div>
</div>
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