Open Source Mythology

I beg to differ, unless you also include the group "People who give a shit about FOSS licenses, but are forced by their job to use windows anyway"

I think “people who daily drive Windows” is an invalid set for comparison here.

I suspect there is a lot more overlap if you instead consider “people who give a shit about FOSS licences” in relation to “people who know what a tiling window manager is and want to use one, and daily drive Windows”.

Exactly, if you don't care about being included in a distribution's repository, you don't have to care about an OSI approved licence.

Installing third party software is much easier on Windows.

thank you for pointing this out! i probably would not have bothered to click through if i hadn't seen this comment, and i would have missed a well-articulated stance on an issue i think about every time i pick a license: whether or not freely sharing my work will have a net positive effect on the world.

on contradiction is an apt choice of essay to look to here.

i wasn't going to speak on twenty enemies because i haven't read it before, but after reading five pages or so i went back to a section that had stuck with me only to discover it was the same one the author had pulled as the first quotation. not exactly where i would have expected to stumble across this, but here we are. again, thank for you calling out that this was more than the milquetoast drivel i had assumed it to be from an uncharitable reading of the title alone.

Basically the license permits you to use the source code for education, compiling builds for individual personal use (no sharing!), and proposing changes to upstream via a fork on github.com. That's it. The part about corporations is just to contrast it to their upstream license to explain that this license does not differentiate between commercial and non-commercial use.

It takes some assumptions to make sense of the "firewall" part. I'm strawsteelmanning here:

- There are Bad People

- If Bad People successfully use my software, it will lead to Bad Things

- The Good Things caused by permissive licenses are more than offset by (or can't compensate for) by the harm done by BP

- My software enables the harm and it wouldn't happen to the same extent without it

- The only way to mitigate this is to retain authority to decide exactly who gets to do what with the source

- Under an Open Source license I am unable to refuse Bad People from using or resharing my software

It follows that any software with enough adoption available under a free license will lead to Bad Things. Therefore the only ethical license is one where the author retains this absolute discretion/power to tell BP "no". This discretion is the "firewall". The inability of the author to arbitrarily forbid users from adopting the software is the "lost right to refusal of the individual" mentioned.

When taken just a bit further it's not too dissimilar to resigning to the reality that we must outlaw strong cryptography and restrict access to general computing and "powerful AI" to only identifiable and accountable non-BP because criminals and terrorists means we can't have nice things and slavery is freedom.

Don't let the fancy quotes and rhetoric give you the illusion that there're any deep insights behind this. Tankies gotta tank.

I do not find it compelling and will continue to promote free software.

I also found that confusing. My guess as to what they mean is that if someone makes changes, they are not obligated to share them with the world?

That is, they are against free and indiscriminate sharing, which would allow bad people to use their software.

They link directly to this Q&A in the OSI FAQ:

> Can I stop “evil people” from using my program?

> No. The Open Source Definition specifies that Open Source licenses may not discriminate against persons or groups. Giving everyone freedom means giving evil people freedom, too.