• blank_sl8
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    3 years ago

    Why is it wrong for Microsoft to provide software to the military and ICE, even while all free and open source projects are available to the military and ICE? Does the author also advocate that open source projects should be released under licenses that restrict such use?

    • rysiek@szmer.info
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      3 years ago

      Because free software projects are not being paid to do so. That’s a pretty damn crucial difference.

      • Zerush
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        OpenSource is free to use for other projects, but not necesesary without to pay for it, there is a lot of OSS which is only freemium or paid soft. In technologic projects (f.Ex.Robotics) all are paid products. For Example the anti-Fingerprint extension Trace is OpenSource, but has a paid premium version with some more functions and filters. Also ProtonVPN and Mail are OSS freemium https://protonvpn.com/blog/open-source/

    • jollyrogue
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      3 years ago

      Ideally there would be a license which disallows such things, yes.

      There are a whole list of things which current licenses don’t cover which people would like to rule out. Commercial projects is probably the big one. Then there is internal only distributions of patches which is widely abused by SaaS companies.

    • Seirdy
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 years ago

      GitHub is both (proprietary) software and a service. The main product is the service, and the software is just a means to that.

      The service consists of SaaS and/or paid support. They sell at least one of these to the military and/or ICE.

      If GitLab or Sourcehut did something similar, the same would apply even those are open-core and FLOSS, respectively.

    • Thann
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 years ago

      With proprietary software, they’re getting all of the killing without any of the freedom

      • jollyrogue
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        3 years ago

        To be fair, the killing is the important part.

      • Zerush
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        The propósit of military is to kill enemies and make rich the weapon industry. They use OSS for the reason, that they can adapt the soft to their needs (spy, harm or kill enemies) better than in closed source, the same reason that have other colectives to use it. For the normal user are important the license conditicion, which can also be excelent in closed source soft. A good example is this.

    • jhghjb (he/they)
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      3 years ago

      thankfully github is not free software so we don’t have to worry about that