from tfa:
> This leads to an important distinction that I draw but that seems routinely ignored among denizens of the web. Namely, that laws and ethics are not one in the same. One can be opposed to using a law to inhibit some undesirable behavior while simultaneously finding that behavior unethical.
Therefore, laws will inevitably end up not matching somoene's ethics, while it's entirely up to you whether you allow others to do things you consider unethical with your software.
So if you do indeed not forbid others from using your software in a way you don't like, you don't have anything to complain about: it was your choice.
* * *
Separately, I'm not certain about the distinction between law and morality. Law is a set of rules of what things shall and shall not be done, being a code of moral rules in this sense. This is also what we use it for: we as societies generally use law to express our ethical stance on murder and violence, for example, but also theft, the permission to take drugs and drink alcohol, to go out at night.
In this case, it's beneficial to my conscience if the law is a codification of my own morality. But the author claims that they make a distinction: there are ethical rules that should not be codified.
Wwere does the line go? I can understand justifying that position by saying that people with different moral codes would riot, making it impractical to forbid what I see as immoral.
I ask this question because that was not explained, and is the justification for preferring to abolish copyright rather than instill the 4 rules, even though the author seems to agree with both, and both are just as impractical to implement at this time (would make people riot).
I’m not sure you grasp my point; its not possible to list all the things you don’t want to happen. In no way does someone waive their right to “be upset” by neglecting to mention all the things they don’t like in a license.
> Separately, I'm not certain about the distinction between law and morality. Law is a set of rules of what things shall and shall not be done, being a code of moral rules in this sense. This is also what we use it for: we as societies generally use law to express our ethical stance on murder and violence, for example, but also theft, the permission to take drugs and drink alcohol, to go out at night.
This is not really true, law is a means of resolving and preventing disputes by codifying acts and their consequences so as to allow social coordination.
> Wwere does the line go? I can understand justifying that position by saying that people with different moral codes would riot, making it impractical to forbid what I see as immoral.
The case is that people with different moral codes would seek to impose their contradictory codes upon each other so we seek the minimum viable ruleset that allows us to live in peace and leave questions of morality up to the individual and their community.
> I ask this question because that was not explained, and is the justification for preferring to abolish copyright rather than instill the 4 rules, even though the author seems to agree with both, and both are just as impractical to implement at this time (would make people riot).
The author explains his opposition is both moral and practical in nature. Moral because ideas are not scarce/rivalrous and so not properly considered property; and practical because law as an instrument is wielded by interested parties who have disproportionate power to realize those interests using the machinery of social order.
But it is true: consequences must be related to what is good/allowed and what isn't. So law is a moral code, but not only that.
> we seek the minimum viable ruleset that allows us to live in peace and leave questions of morality up to the individual
That's where my confusion stems from: neither abolishing copyright is that, nor are the 4 rules of Free Software. Since the author finds both acceptable, why favor one over the other?
> Moral because ideas are not scarce/rivalrous and so not properly considered property
Maybe I'm missing something, but neither the four freedoms, nor abolishing copyright depend on treating software as property.
> because law as an instrument is wielded by interested parties who have disproportionate power
I'm also not sure if I get the reference. The author opposes copyleft on the grounds that it's based on copyright, which they oppose to, but copyleft as a legal trick would no longer be needed with the four freedoms being law.
Maybe to clarify my confusion, this fragment:
> I would support the right of persons to publish binary programs while making its source code obfuscated or impossible to attain. This is a clear violation of the four essential freedoms as described by the Free Software Foundation. Yet, it would be legal---but perhaps not ethical---to do it in a world in which intellectual property does not exist.
The author is clearly in moral agreement in the four freedoms, but advocates allowing people to break them in the ideal world. Since the ideal world is just as impractical in terms of minimum viable rule set, why not simply use the four freedoms as the moral base?
Legal consequences are facts, morals are values, they are different things. There is no necessary connection between law and what is right, cf. nazi germany, ussr, aztec human sacrifice, etc.
> That's where my confusion stems from: neither abolishing copyright is that, nor are the 4 rules of Free Software.
Neither copyright nor codifying the 4 rules are strictly necessary. I’m not sure where your confusion lies.
> I'm also not sure if I get the reference. The author opposes copyleft on the grounds that it's based on copyright
The author opposes licenses which seek to apply the rules of property to intangible items for reasons which he has specified in the op. “Based on copyright” is a lossy encoding.
> four freedoms being law
Oppose on the same grounds as copyright.
> The author is clearly in moral agreement in the four freedoms, but advocates allowing people to break them in the ideal world. Since the ideal world is just as impractical in terms of minimum viable rule set, why not simply use the four freedoms as the moral base?
Not all immoral behavior should be prohibited with the coercive power of the state.
But consequences come from judgements, and judgements reflect values. Therefore law, like morality, necessarily includes values.
> There is no necessary connection between law and what is right
As a moral relativist, I would say that because law defines morality, it makes right by definition. But at the same time, there are many moralities, and so, many rights.
> I’m not sure where your confusion lies.
It's that the author decided to take a stance already, and I'm not finding a good justification for one over the other.
> The author opposes licenses which seek to apply the rules of property to intangible items
Perhaps here lies the crux: nothing in the four freedoms seems to me like a license or rule of property, because none of them enforce scarcity. I got an impression that the author didn't oppose them on those grounds, but I might be misreading.
> Not all immoral behavior should be prohibited with the coercive power of the state.
But this is the value judgement I'm questioning. Apart from situations where it would be destabilizing due to different values of the people, why not? And since the article already lays out two fully destabilizing options, why not choose the option that aligns with their values better?
if law defines morality then we are unable to say any law is immoral. We are also unable to make laws on the basis of our moral judgment because that would be circular reasoning.
> It's that the author decided to take a stance already, and I'm not finding a good justification for one over the other.
The justification is that in the author's view, property rights are a social technology for allocating scarce resources and i.p. are not scarce (in the economic sense).
> But this is the value judgement I'm questioning. Apart from situations where it would be destabilizing due to different values of the people, why not?
There are at least two reasons. One, what you mentioned: different people have different moral judgment but must live together using the same law. So law must account for different people's morals without favoring one over the other any more than necessary. Secondly, since we can't test moral judgments in a laboratory in order to give them objective reality, we must approach moral questions with humility and that leads us to refrain from using the coercive power of the state to enforce our values on other people when possible.
> And since the article already lays out two fully destabilizing options, why not choose the option that aligns with their values better?
I'm not convinced that both options are equally destabilizing.
thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Author here. As a point of clarity, I oppose codifying the four freedoms into law because the only way to do it is under a regime of intellectual property. That is, it requires assuming, at some point, that ideas or intangible things are property.
> This commonly comes up in discussions where folks release software under a license that allows some bad behavior (like plagiarism) and then complain when that plagiarism happens. People inevitably respond with some low brow blame-the-victim nonsense, "well, that's what you get for using a license that allows it."
Statements like these reflect the confusion between license requirements and ethics. Yes, it's completely legal to use an existing FOSS work without explicit acknowledgements. And sometimes, it may even be considered by people/authors as totally reasonable (one certainly doesn't expect every single program in existence to acknowledge GCC or clang, unless you are writing a complier based on the ideas found in them).
However, when a company releases a product that is substantially based on a FOSS project (or its idea) legally without giving explicit credit, it's still all but fair for its authors to express their dissatisfaction on the lack of acknowledgement. Sure, the company has the legal right to do so, and not everyone will find that it's problematic. Regardless, it's also certain that it will be criticized by many members of the public as being unfriendly to developers, and I think the existence of such public criticisms is not less reasonable than the act of using something without acknowledgement (read: use without acknowledgement in the way you want, and get criticized in the way we expect).
Giving credit is not fully a legal matter, and I don't think attempting to codify all the requirements of acknowledgement in a bunch of software license is the right way to go. What we need is probably an informal code of conduct on attribution in the software industry.
The flip side, of course, is that you can have "picked the wrong license" if your intent was to force someone to do something. The latter does happen a lot of the time, especially when someone goes up against a company that seems to have lost its way morally.
Yes, for this purpose, copyleft is an example which forces everyone to keep the software and its derivative works free, and from history we know it's very effective. Nevertheless, I have some doubts on whether a copyleft-style acknowledgement license will effectively work in a similar way as we described due to some practical problems below.
First, it has no power on independent implementations. In the academia, if J. Random Hacker developed a new algorithm that solved an important problem and published under a free license, sequentially, all the relevant papers that come after that will acknowledge that "In 2020, J. R. Hacker, et al. developed the first....", even if what the paper shows in an independent research not directly related to the original. However, such acknowledgement can never be enforced using a license. This is not just a hypothetical scenario, earlier in this year, the first controversy on using FOSS without acknowledgement was the AppGet incident [0], which has received strong attention to the community. If my observation is correct, it's how the current discussion began. However, in this case, Microsoft didn't reuse any the original code from AppGet - WinGet was an independent implementation by Microsoft in another programming language and has no similarity to AppGet at the source code level. However, the accusation was that "WinGet works pretty much identical to the way AppGet works", in other words, it only served as an inspiration for Microsoft on its high-level architecture. In the academia, we certainly expect such inspiration to be acknowledged, on the other hand, an "attribution" license will have zero legal effect - If the proposed license cannot even address the prime controversy that triggered the entire discussion, what's the point?
Second, if acknowledgement is forced by a license, the license must be careful not to overspecify the acknowledgement requirement. A historical example of overspecification is the original 4-clause BSD license, which includes an advertising clause, "all advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the <organization>." It requires all promotional materials of a product to include an acknowledgement if a piece of 4-clause BSD software is included. Such a requirement is inherently problematic to integrators, distributions, and packagers, which are an important part of the community. For a distribution, it must acknowledge 1,000+ projects (even in a one-page poster) to comply with the license [1]. Thus, the copyleft-style acknowledgement license must include some forms of "escape" conditions to allow one to skip acknowledgement.
Examples: you can skip the acknowledgement if...
1. If you are shipping more than 10 programs simultaneously.
Failure mode: This requirement is too simple. A bad company will simply ship a bunch of packages to get a free pass. Thus, the conditions should be more robust if your intention is to force bad actors to behave in certain ways ("someone goes up against a company that seems to have lost its way morally").
2. If it's used in an unmodified form (LGPL-like).
Failure mode: If the original project has been forked by the community, the exception becomes useless again, and everyone has to spam acknowledgements everywhere. Thus, conditions of higher complexity should be used.
As you see, in order to avoid inadequacy of the license, and to prevent bad actors to abuse the escape clauses, I'm afraid that it's possible that these conditions can quickly become extremely convoluted and difficult to follow. Perhaps someone can come up with an elegant solution, but I'll remain skeptical until the solution is demonstrated.
Third, this hypothetical copyleft-style acknowledgement license would be incompatible with most existing copyleft licenses, namely GPL (unlike most pessimistic licenses, which are GPL-compatible), making it impractical in the larger established community. Traditional copyleft licenses, such as GPL-2 or GPL-3, explicitly forbids relicensing to prevent a bad actor from nullifying its the copyleft nature by additional restrictions. Since no additional licensing terms shall be added, any code under the acknowledgement license can never be used in a GPL'd project, nor can it use any GPL code. Even worse, multi-licensing, the traditional solution to this cooperation problem cannot be used - In the existing community, if cooperation between GPL and BSD developers are needed, the code can be explicitly dual-licensed or even triple-licensed to avoid compatibility problems, for example, Linux kernel has dual-licensed GPL/BSD code, and Firefox is available under three licenses. However, if multi-licensing is applied to a copyleft-style acknowledgement license, the license becomes useless and pointless to enforce, since a bad actor will simply select an alternative license.
In conclusion, I'm not sure whether a copyleft-style acknowledgement license is a good idea.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287
[1] Worse, it won't be a problem initially, but only after most people had noticed this trend: they would want their acknowledgements too, and everyone would start adding advertising clauses, in the end - everyone spams all posters with credit and nobody gains any notability, it's kind of a tragedy of the commons. The only way to stop this problem is explicitly discouraging everyone from using this license, which is what has happened to the original BSD license.
Mutual vulnerability is one of the keys to healthy relationships (in marriage, teamwork etc). From this perspective, the discussed statement makes perfect sense to me.
People avoid building relationships with invulnerable, and normal people don't optimize for their own invulnerability, to not miss out on relationships.
It seems like a lot of emotional language trying to obscure a pretty straightforward situation.
Compare it with me not realising I'm logged in to the production database, and accidentally wiping it. Sure, you could say "that's what you get for logging in to the production database", but you could also say that maybe the organisation setup shouldn't have led me to logging in there.
I'm not arguing whether or not it's nice to do this, but I think it's important to be clear that what you set out in your licence is important, and your fault if it's wrong.
I said as much in the opening of my post. I get into both philosophical and practical discussions on licensing online fairly frequently, and the same questions and arguments are recycled over and over. So I wrote them down primarily so that I can reference them.
As far as my beliefs, ideally, I want to see IP abolished. So what if it's quixotic? I have plenty of other quixotic beliefs. I'd like to see the war on drugs ended too. I don't see a problem with having these beliefs.
You might say it's a waste of time to have and act on these beliefs. I think it should be clear from my post that I at least partially agree with that, since I've continually acted as a pragmatist rather than as an idealist. But that doesn't mean I can't take some small steps toward the ideal while I'm at it.
Sometimes shifting the Overton window just a little bit is a big victory.
> (As a legal realist, I think we should evaluate law like any other human activity; licenses that lead to outcomes that we want are good, licenses that lead to outcomes that we don't want are bad).
I don't really share that view when it comes to law, so we probably have some really fundamental disagreement somewhere. But, I do think elements of legal realism are important. They just aren't what form the bedrock of my beliefs.
> I, at least, assume that when someone uses a license that grants me permission to do something (such as falsely claim authorship of their code), they approve of me doing that thing, because that's what people granting permission in a license normally mean by that grant of permission.
To me, that implies you conflate laws with ethics. Again, probably due to some fundamental disagreement on the nature of law (or ethics).
This is not too dissimilar from the common refrain of, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I support you're right to say it." It's an explicit acknowledgment that there's a difference between what's legal and what's ethical/preferential/whatever.
I don't think laws are the same as ethics, but I do think that laws and especially changes to the law are a means to an end.
> This is not too dissimilar from the common refrain of, "I may not agree with what you have to say, but I support you're right to say it." It's an explicit acknowledgment that there's a difference between what's legal and what's ethical/preferential/whatever.
I don't think it is. People who say that think that everyone saying what they think is ethical/preferential/whatever; they may disagree with that person's views, but they think a world where everyone says what they think is better than a world where people keep their disagreeable views quiet. Or they value having a spread of views rather than a monoculture. They'd prefer the person not have those particular views at all, sure, but the thing they want to legalise is the thing that they want to happen, when viewed at the right level of abstraction.
If you want to encourage people doing what they like with code they found rather than worrying about what the author permits them to do, then fair enough, but I don't think using an obscure license is an effective means to that end. (I've heard some people advocate "license anarchy" - deliberately not putting any license on code they publish, so that it's most easily used by people who don't worry about licensing - of course, this prevents the kind of corporate use you're also wanting to encourage). People who are actually going to check which specific license you're using are already a minority. People who are going to check the minutiae of your reasoning and not just assume that you mean the same thing by using the UNLICENSE that most people using the UNLICENSE mean are a fraction of a fraction. And if the upshot of all that is that you just want them to act the same way they would if your code was under the MIT license, then all you're going to do is piss them off.
I mean, I've put more time and effort into understanding this than the vast majority of users will, and I still have very little idea what you actually, concretely want people who find your code to do. Use it only in free programs? Use it in proprietary programs with attribution? Use it in proprietary programs without attribution? A philosophical position is all well and good, but people looking at a license are mostly trying to find out what they concretely should or shouldn't do.
This feels wrong. How can someone be a victim of an act they voluntarily declared was okay?