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Activism through open source. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi all,

Before write what I am about to write, I would like to be clear that this is a very controversial topic and, for the eyes of many of you, this will be even silly.

I also know that open source means "open for everyone", and any conditional to that automatically makes a piece of software non-open source.

I really feel pissed off to see such effort for brilliant people from open source community being used for terrible things. So I started to nurture the idea of a license that would forbid the usage of a project by totalitarian governments, including its department and contractors, military forces of any country, certain entities like radical political parties, etc. Basically limiting the usage of those projects to any activity promoting human suffering.

Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think this is not exactly the point. I never thought that license would fight rocket. Nor I thought that an authoritarian regime would respect license.

The first point affects more countries and companies that still keep ties with those regimes.

The second point is to have a clear position. For me it is hypocritical to say "open source for a better world" at the same time that we say "how my contributions are used is not my problem".

I bet with you that commo libraries like slf4j, junit, poetry, fastapi, etc. are being used by those regimes and their associates very often. Make a license more restrictive would create legal problems for any legitimate foreign entity to buy from those regimes. If they opt to re-inplement those libraries, it's fine as well: tons of resources and money expended by those jerks.

Even commercial licenses are problematic to enforce, I know. But send a clear message seems a point where our hands can reach and worth to pursue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

the logic that sending messages alters political reality is part of the overall problem. Politics is a conflict of forces, not a conflict of ideas or opinions. A license is as powerful as the will of the state power behind it to enforce it. Otherwise, it is powerless.

If you want to make sense of the political world, I invite to move beyond the idea of "taking stances" or expressing positions as a political act, and reason instead of what incentives and powers you're altering with your political actions.

What you describe just does not play out in real life: neither on a micro scale nor on a macro scale.