• charles@lemmy.computer.surgery
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    1 year ago

    Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

    This was actually pretty thought-provoking, so thanks for that. It seems like your argument is founded on the idea that non-sentient entities are incapable of being politically charged. In a vacuum where no sentient entities exist to charge them politically, this is trivially true. However, we don’t live in such a vacuum. As such, one must take into consideration that a subset[1] of people do consider a subset[1:1] of non-sentient entities to be inherently politically charged, and since one can’t know who considers what to be politically charged, one must treat all non-sentient entities as (at least potentially) politically charged. Of course, one may choose to ignore that subset[1:2] of people (which itself is a politically charged decision) but that doesn’t change the fact that any given non-sentient entity could be considered politically charged.

    I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

    Sorry, it seems you’ve repeated yourself rather than addressing the specific point I had asked for elaboration on. Would you mind trying again?


    1. Specifically a “non-strict subset” in the mathematical sense ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

    • pitninja
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      1 year ago

      I didn’t repeat myself on the second point. Either one’s politics endorse intellectual property rights, which include the rights of an individual or organization to permit/limit any or all of those specific facets I mentioned previously according to their preference or one does not believe intellectual property rights exist. That’s the only meaningful way I can conceive of software licenses being a political concept, but I’m welcome to hear your take.

      • charles@lemmy.computer.surgery
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        1 year ago

        The question isn’t the legitimacy of intellectual property rights, the question is how these permissions and restrictions are apolitical. People license their code with the expectation that the terms are adhered to, regardless of whether the license is actually enforceable. How are these terms (“specific rights to attribute, use, modify, reproduce, distribute, etc.”) apolitical?

        Edit: I won’t be able to reply any further because I’ve shut down my Lemmy instance.