- cross-posted to:
- opensource
- cross-posted to:
- opensource
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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?
Because free software projects are not being paid to do so. That’s a pretty damn crucial difference.
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/
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.
there are licenses like that, you’ll probably like The Hippocratic License
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They use Red Hat, so probably not.
thankfully github is not free software so we don’t have to worry about that
With proprietary software, they’re getting all of the killing without any of the freedom
To be fair, the killing is the important part.
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.
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.
I mean I kinda get what the article is trying to say but the inflammatory rhetoric is a bit off-putting. Things are rarely as black and white as “M$ bad, quit your job good”.
I use Void Linux as my main Linux distro and the thing I hate about it is that the community facing things are hosted on github. But it’s a small team running a fairly large project so I let it pass.
OpenSource is a free format, in order to share codes with developers and encourage the development of new software and also mechanisms. For this reason it is used by practically all companies, institutions, research centers and universities, whether private or public. It is irrelevant in the background who distributes them, what is important is the purpose of the project. It is not only GitHub where it is MS that distributes OSS, but also Google, NASA and many state and commercial institutions This is why I am always amused when someone claims that OSS stands for privacy and security, which is deeply untrue. In this aspect there is no more privacy or / and security than in any other software, it always depends on the purpose of the software, the developer’s intentions and the maintenance the product receives (the source is also visible for hackers, bad in a soft disatended).
