@eb I really hope that this causes an industry-wide reckoning with the common practice of letting your entire goddamn product rest on the shoulders of one overworked person having a slow mental health crisis without financially or operationally supporting them whatsoever. I want everyone who has an open source dependency to read this message https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.html
@eb "I never thought a sophisticated APT would backdoor *my* volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I got for free" sobs entire industry who voted for the "volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I get for free with no defense against sophisticated APTs" party
@krans @glyph @eb sure. well, so the reason we personally call the thing we do "free software" is precisely to highlight the point that our own goal in publishing stuff without charge is very much to work towards a world without that problem, by creating something that exists as far outside it as we can manage (not all the way - obviously we have the free time to do that because of our other privileges)
@irenes @glyph @eb I thought it was called "free software" because users are allowed to do whatever they want to with it including modifications, not because it's provided free of charge.
The founders of the Free Software movement were Libertarians, not Socialists (unfortunately).
I guess we were talking at cross purposes — sorry.
@krans @glyph @eb we're very proactive-death-of-the-author about this. the FSF has failed to provide ideological leadership due to RMS's top-down style, but many of the ideals are good ones and it's the job of the current generation to renew the movement if we want our children to be able to enjoy its fruits the way we did
I think @rms did a huge error basing what was a hacker¹ movement on the value of freedom alone.
#Freedom (like #Communion) is a totalizant value, a value that can blind people from other important values, so much that it's the foundational value of #Capitalism (much like what #Communion was for #Comunism).
As we can all see that #FreeSoftware lost its political goals, being used much more to reduce human freedom than to increase it (#Google and #Facebook would not exists without exploiting huge amount of developers' work donated as Free Software, much like #GitHub #Copilot / #CopyALot), we should really move to something different.
Years ago I wrote the #HackingLicense ² to this aim, a (network) #copyleft license (and a shrink-wrap contract) that has been used successfully in a couple of projects.
It doesn't forbid commercial use of the covered works and even share the copyright with the users that comply with the license itself, BUT contractually impose a complete reciprocity, as any work that benefit in any way from the covered work must be distributed in the same way.
IOW, if you use my work under the Hacking License, I can use and distribute your work under the same terms. Even if it's a LLM, or a software including its output.
I'm not sure the Hacking License is the best tool to get back freedom, communion and #Curiosity, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
¹ http://www.tesio.it/2020/09/03/not_all_hackers_are_americans.html
² http://www.tesio.it/documents/HACK.txt
@Shamar @rms @krans @glyph @eb that's a good analysis. we do agree that, like, any complete statement of values should have more than one thing on it, or at least more elaboration of what they mean in-context.
we'll take a look at the license. we do think the work to be done is more social than legal, we suspect copyright law as a tool for change has gone about as far as it can.