cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/119645
The amount of libertarian ideology present in FOSS is shocking
Yeah, I can’t believe the shit liberals say (hehe) sometimes…
It will be interesting to watch China’s move away from Windoze and how they handle licensing.
I do like public domain licenses in some niche cases like configuration files, but the GPLs are absolutely far better for protecting decently large projects
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Over the past few years I’ve gotten a bit down on copyleft myself. In brief, they create a commons that is uniquely exploitable by capitalists, by virtue of their control over infrastructure, at least here in “the west”.
There is a nascent “copyfarleft” commons that tries to fix this in a bunch of only-partially-compatible ways. It can make use of permissively licensed software for bootstrapping, but not copyleft software.
Could you give some examples of the problems caused by copyleft licenses?
“A commons that is uniquely exploitable by capitalists” is pretty much the size of it. I could also boil it down as “freedom zero exists”, but if you see that as a strength, you’re unlikely to be swayed by that ^^. A few angles beneath the folds:
<details> <summary>The money argument</summary> The way code generates revenue these days is overwhelmingly about a big infrastructure-owning capitalist putting up a SaaS and charging people for access. They do this so effectively that others - including the authors of the software, who typically rent their infrastructure - get only a sliver of total revenue on offer.
Nothing in the GPL protects people from this, which is why copyleft people wrote the AGPL. However, the advantage their exploiters have comes from the infrastructure, not the code, so AGPL is ineffective.
In view of this lack of effectiveness, non-copyleft people have been trying different approaches. The Commons Clause and SSPL come from infrastructure-renting little capitalists. They try to get a leg up by putting onerous restrictions on their competition. It’s not been a great success so far, as MongoDB and Elasticsearch demonstrate. Those have suffered from project seizure via forking, but that’s not always possible - new projects are coming along with licenses like this, or with similar effect, baked in from the start, e.g., WriteFreely (AGPL, but with special privileges for the original authors).
My heart doesn’t bleed for the little capitalists, so this angle doesn’t move me much, but it does sometimes get strong copyleft advocates to agree that there is something imperfect going on in their commons, even if they don’t think these license innovations are the right tool for fixing it. </details>
<details> <summary>The moral responsibility argument</summary>
When I create something, I feel morally responsible for how it’s used. Inside wage relations, this mostly boils down to refusing to work for some employers. I wouldn’t want to become even-more complicit than I already am in, say, the bombing of Yemen, by working at an involved munitions factory. I wouldn’t work at a company on the BDS list either. Liberals had an attempted boycott of companies that worked with ICE, back when Trump was in charge and keeping children in cages was unfashionable. It’s not sufficient, of course, but it’s also not nothing.
If I create a copyrightable work of my own, this sense of responsibility coalesces around who I choose to license it to, and under what terms. If it’s closed-source software, I get to decide this on a case-by-case basis, and I would absolutely refuse to provide it to certain people or organisations. We see this with musicians (those who own their works, anyway) refusing to let political campaigns or adverts use it, for instance.
Now, copyleft makes a big claim: I should discard this feeling of responsibility, because doing so leads to better software. A mortal enemy might help to improve it! Wow!
This is the basis of freedom zero, and usually finds expression in a hypothetical conflict between pro-choice / anti-choice software authors.
I used to be very impressed by this idea. For the life of me, I can’t remember why. Better software is not an imperative - we’d be fine with good-enough software. We’d cope alright with substandard software. We’d make do without any software at all, if we had to.
What about “better software” makes it reasonable to disclaim that sense of responsibility? Why are people such enthusiasts about creating a huge body of excellent software that their mortal enemies can use? Why do that instead of creating a huge body of good-enough software that their mortal enemies can’t use? Why don’t communists s/mortal/class/ and party on?
Copyfarleft licenses like the Cooperative Software License try to express the author’s convictions, in defiance of freedom zero, so they can retain that responsibility. The JSON License, with its line about being used “for Good, not Evil”, could be called an early precursor, I suppose. </details>
<details> <summary>Copyleft vs permissive</summary>
The previous arguments work the same whether the software under discussion is copyleft or permissive, but permissive software can be used to bootstrap alternatives (i.e. can be combined with copyfarleft code), whereas copyleft software can’t.
The copyfarleft commons basically doesn’t exist at the moment, of course, but writing more GPL code doesn’t help it to come into existence. Writing more MIT code might. </details>
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To talk a little about my own “journey” with this - 20 years ago, I was very impressed with FSF philosophy. 10 years ago, even, it all seemed obvious. When heartbleed rolled around, I started to experience worries about the “economic incentives” FOSS created. Sometime after I became a communist, I realised copyleft helps my class enemies more than my class allies. Now, I write permissively licensed code and dicker around with various copyfarleft licenses, trying to find the secret sauce that will fix everything. It probably doesn’t exist, of course.
So in the end, the fascism/freedom thing in the original post still makes absolutely no sense, but I do find myself sympathetic to “don’t use GPL”, for very different reasons.
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Capitalists aren’t very interested in building commons; it’s not their goal. They can use both copyleft and permissively-licensed stuff to accomplish their goal.
If your goal is to build a commons that capitalists can’t use, then you’re looking at copyfarleft. Being able to bootstrap that effort with already-existing code is very helpful. You can do that with permissively licensed code, but you can’t do it with copyleft code.
Or to put it another way: if you wanted a copyfarleft kernel, you could start by forking openbsd, but you couldn’t start by forking linux.
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Thank you, this was an interesting read. The issue of SaaS is a good point. Basically, if I understand you correctly, the problem is that the GPLs and the like don’t do enough to prohibit major capitalists from furthering their own goals, which are obviously in contrast with basically everyone else’s, so we should use licenses that explicitly prohibit commercial use unless all surplus value is distributed among the worker-owners in a co-op. I can definitely get behind that idea.
Thanks. I’ve been throwing these ideas at various walls for a few years now, trying to get something that sticks, and that isn’t immediately rejected out-of-hand by FOSS advocates 😅
Yeah, you’re pretty much spot on. These big fish are using the tools we build “for anyone” to construct a prison for us, right in plain sight, and we just… keep building the tools? How does that make sense?
Yeah, I’ve never seen this type of license before (aside from CC BY-NC, which doesn’t have an exception for co-ops and doesn’t seem to be widely used for code), but it makes sense. I think a lot of people (like me) find licenses rather complex and tend to flock to the most popular ones, and it’s not as easy to convince someone to use a license that’s drastically different to what they’re used to (as opposed to, for example, MIT vs. BSD 2/3-clause, or GPL vs. MPL).
but companies still cannot redistribute GPL3 code… so isn’t that actually better than permissive?
They can redistribute the code, but only under the same (or a compatible) license. Whether it’s better depends on the type of software – if a company can use it as a service (without redistributing it, e.g. as part of a server), GPL3 won’t prevent it from using the code in its own commercial product without making the product’s code publicly available.
But GPL3 will still restrict the distribution of your software. Sadly if ur sh*t isn’t friendly enough to corporations then it won’t make it to the masses in the tech world.
Yes, there are certainly many cases where a copyleft license is preferable to a more permissive license; my point is that there are still some significant loopholes
I was told that AGPL can be modified to make something useful. You can’t count on copyfarleft actually holding any legal weight in crapitalist countries.
SSPL is modified AGPL, so pepole are certainly trying that route. I’m not too optimistic myself.
And yeah, if you try to play by the rules, you’ll always find the rules change on you the moment you start to achieve success. I’d file that under “this is a nice problem to have”, personally.
Well GPL3 holds legal weight from what I can tell. Companies don’t want to touch it… Or do they?
It’s just that stuff like the Peer Production License is largely unproven and there isn’t a big legal framework protecting it like the FSF.
I think there are limits to what we can realistically achieve with software licenses. The goal should be to at least minimize damage as much as possible.
The AGPL is the best free software license we have access to currently that has been legaly tried and tested. You can not overly trust on copyright ones, even derivative ones of the AGPL because any modifications for it need to meet a long line of legal checkboxes in the west for them to mean fucking anything. If you can show me a free software license that is copyfarleft and has been backed up by a lawyer as being properly written then I will will consider supporting it. Writing licenses or modifying them is a very tricky game and its something not to go around fucking about with without some sort of legal counsel.
If you have the money to draft some new fancy license with a lawyer? Go for it. No? Use the fucking AGPL.
That was the impression/counseling I got. And I was told you can make small addons/mods to the AGPL…
How can we learn more about this stuff?
Uh you can 100% Legally modify the AGPL. The issue is not on whether if you can or can not, rather companies will find every loophole possible in your bullshit to try to exploit it, which is why I am saying to be weary on making modifications.
What exactly these limits are become a bit more difficult. The US govt has a 500 page book on all of the ins and outs of copyright regulation if you were really dedicated. here
Copyright law is also a constantly changing field with court decisions changing the grounds quite often for example here.
Software licenses are legal documents, and not something to be taken lightly. My point is that for modifications and for drafting your own licenses it is very important to consult people are qualified on such things because I have no fucking clue what exact bounds there are. I am not a lawyer.
It is just a risky move imo.
P.S. I found something about the use of these kinds of licenses, but little about their legal viability I think.
