Compare to a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray from an era past. You are legally allowed to scoop up all the pennies into a bag, and leave the store, then repeat at the neighboring store, and make a few bucks. You'd be an asshole, but not face legal trouble. You "followed the rules" to the letter. But guess what? If you publish an easy how-to guide with "one weird trick" for making some quick cash, and people start adopting your antisocial behavior and emptying out change trays, you've forced the issue and now either a) businesses will stop offering this convenience or b) the rules around it will be tightened and the utility will be degraded. In the concrete case of Anubis, the maintainers may decide to stop contributing their time to this useful software or place a non-FOSS license on it in an attempt to stop gain-maximizing sociopaths from exploiting their efforts.
Your analogy to me seems imprecise, as analogies tend to be when it comes to digital goods. I'm not taking pennies in any sense here, preventing the next person from making use of some public good.
You can make a similar argument for piracy or open source, and yet... Here we all still are and open source has won for the most part.
The GPL protects users from any restrictions the author wants to use. No additional restrictions are allowed, whether technical or legal.
In this case, the restriction is social, but is a restriction nonetheless (some enforce it by harassment, some by making you feel bad).
But you could ignore it, even fork it and create a white label version, and be proud of it (thereby bypassing the restriction). Donate voluntarily if you want to contribute, without being restricted technically, legally, or socially.
I even it out by how I prioritize feature requests, bug reports, and the like :)
I didn't implement this out of fear or some lack of courage. In fact I had the original avatars up for quite a while. I simply wanted my own logo so visitors wouldn't be potentially confused. It seemed to fit the use case and there was no way to achieve what I wanted without reaching out. I didn't feel comfortable bugging you or anybody on account of my tiny little no-traffic git forge even though, yes, that is what you politely asked for (and did not demand).
I think if you do feel this strongly you might consider changing the software's license or the phrasing of the request in the documentation. Or perhaps making it very clear that no matter how small, you want to be reached out to for the whitelabel version.
I think the success story of Anubis has been awesome to read about and follow and seeing how things unfold further will be fun to watch and possibly even contribute to. I'm personally rooting for you and your project!
Some project even took it to the next level and displayed a furry porn. I think anime and furry graphics are related, esp. in the weird obsession of the people to shove it to the unsuspecting people, but since it's "cute" it's passable. Well unless it gets into the porn territory.
On the other hand I applaud the author for an interesting variation of making the free product slightly degraded so people are incentived to donate money. The power of defaults and their misuse.
Personally I'm not fan of enshittification of any kind even a slight one even when it's to my own detriment.
Except the author is not shoving any stuff at you. Author doesn't owe anything to you and can do whatever they want and you doesn't owe the author the obligation to use their software.
It's not business, it's a person giving something free to the world and asking people who uses it to play the game. You can chose to not play the game or to not use it, but you can't act like your issue with an anime character is the author's fault. Just don't install it on your server and go ahead.
Are you sure you have the right pronouns for Xe?
This is your weird association and hang-up. That's on you to deal with, not Anubis or the rest of the internet.
The author clearly went out of the way to put code in to signal to people that if you use the software and you are a company earning revenue using it, to help support the project.
This is clearly breaking the social contract that comes along with that MIT license, guided by what the author says.
When you break the social contract, and by doing so you induce people to follow you to do the same, eventually (given sufficient breakage) you end up in a world on fire; filled with violence and destruction.
This happens because non-violent conflict resolution can't take place without society, which itself is based on the social contract. A contract that you broke by trying to work around the authors intent.
It is well known that with people, "What you do in the small things, you do in big things that matter when everything is on the line". This piece of old wisdom, shows a cognitive preferential bias.
Ipso facto, you are supporting that world on fire filled with violence coming into being by those actions.
Sure you don't see anything wrong now, but that is blindness, and you can hold that isolated view right now while society is still in a working state, but actions and choices matter, and society moves towards the aggregate, either towards stability or towards chaos.
There is a time that is not far off, where that kind of behavior is going to have severe consequences.
If you did this without any resistance or seeing this as wrong, you have to ask yourself how many other things you've done that you just didn't notice? Are your kids modeling this blindness in themselves? Mimicking you as a role model.
Blindness puts people at a significant disadvantage because they often can't see the dangers they often create indirectly for themselves.
This is not 'equating' because they aren't the same thing, its reasoning that logically follows, which is in part based on history and an understanding of how society actually formed, worked, and why its been slowly failing (to the best of our greatest thinkers knowledge over our recorded history).
You are only focused on the MIT license and exclude all other things, but that is not all there is, the author published their intent.
The process you followed is putting blinders on, looking at one thing in isolation. The MIT license.
You ignore the authors words and published intent, and go so far as to undo them, while taking and using the majority of the author's work. There was a social contract and an MIT license. One is based in law, the other is based in the goodwill inherent in society, the general implicit intent towards promoting survival and growth for people of like principles.
This process follows a well known reasoning structure in philosophy, its called the fallacy of isolation. You learn all about these flawed structures in a trivium based education that doesn't follow a lying to children paradigm (which is the opposite of a first-principled approach (greeks), instead embracing torture structures and parasitism/dependency).
You learn these things so you can avoid using them accidentally, and by extension speak and relay true words and arguments.
Its flawed reasoning or a fallacy because it oversimplifies, and uses a biased sample to justify something that can't be justified in the general sense, it overgeneralizes the isolated part for a self-driven purpose which is not based on external measure but on your intent (to justify your action).
In other words, you have separated the objectionable concern to do something.
This separation of objectionable concerns is a structure that the Nazi's and East German Stasi mastered and brought to the masses, to devastating effect. Redefining the meaning of words is also something the Nazi's used, you didn't do this but I mention it because its common too.
The Wannsee Conference documented both of these things iirc, a movie depicting this was made in 2001 called "Conspiracy" based on the recorded minutes of that conference. The unspoken part of that movie is those that didn't agree at the conference were to later be killed. Well worth a watch if you can't envision these things.
Getting back to the matter, if you wanted to make different software without a restriction imposed by the author's intent, you should do that without leaning on the author's work.
Honestly, that's the ethical thing to do. Proof of Work isn't a difficult concept, it would be almost trivial to put together a solution that would do the same thing given all the implementations available to reference with crypto (which uses PoW).
I'd highly suggest you read a bit more about the basis for the Western way of life (The underlying principles which inspired the founding fathers to rebel against the crown and start a new nation; America), and so you can see the logical steps that lead to bad outcomes.
Social Contract Theory, and the Greeks/Roman history are good places to start.
Choices and actions matter, even if they are small, the smallest ripple can quickly grow. The choices and actions inspire others one way or another to do the same.
I guess I took the MIT license as the author's word and intent. Are you saying their choice of license is not? It clearly outlines that I am free to use the software without restriction which you conveniently leave out of your core argument.
If you want to talk about open source and the social contract, this is the heart of it: freedom, which I have exercised. If I was using it for commercial purposes and doing something more against the "spirit of open source" I think I might be inclined to agree with you. But I'm not.
the funding page clarifies their intent:
>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
you are of course free to do whatever you want with this code, the license is as you point out quite clear. but so is the intent, and feigning ignorance of the author's intent is disingenuous at best.
If you'll allow me to make assumptions, given that the author neither demands -- and is, in fact, explicit about not doing so -- nor licenses the software in such a way as to prevent this use case, I am guessing the author had at least some intent or foreknowledge around some folks wanting to swap the images. I further assumed that such use cases were for instances such as those the author wrote Anubis for to begin with, protecting small git forges with little resources. Now, I admit my server is not small and I have resources, and so am happy to pay for and donate towards open source software, but in this case the only option was to contact the author, which is something I deemed overkill in this case. I would simply wait and see how the author planned to approach the issue and revisit at that time.
Perhaps I've made the wrong move socially or ethically, which I think is at least a worthwhile discussion to have, and if I should decide I feel like I've made an ethically sideways choice, I will eat my words and make things right as best as I can.
However, if we're going to talk about intent, I an guessing there is a bit more nuance to bring to the conversation. Or perhaps the author can chime in or update the documentation to be more clear, because the liberal license says quite a lot about intent to me. I think it's at least a little disingenuous to say that the software license carries no intent behind it (spirit of open source and all that) and is "only" an enumeration of my rights.
I think it's clear the author "desires" or "wants" folks to keep the images. However, I think the author also "wants" users to use the software without restriction, hence the license.
If I say I intend one thing in one place, but then also say another thing orthogonal to that thing elsewhere that seems to be at odds, what was my intent truly? If my actions do not line up with my words, how do external parties judge what is the socially acceptable approach given my two statements that are at odds?
I simply think the choice of license says a lot more about intent, and is, in fact, the mechanism by which a creator decides how their code may be used. If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way, the license is _the_ way to have control over that.
I believe this conversation is a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be and the discussion around "what is open source" is where this discussion begins and ends. I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", which, I agree with you, seems clear, but is not expressed fully, given the chosen unrestricted license.
I wasn't even aware that you had reached out directly where the author made themselves clear. The license doesn't supersede the authors words.
When there's a contradiction, you take the authors words and intent first, the same as any hierarchical set of documents. The authors words will be far more detailed than any license, and the social contract comes first so everyone can continue receiving benefit under it. There are edge cases, this isn't one of them.
By focusing on the license to the exclusion of all else, you pigeonhole the only actions so the only alternative is to not provide any solutions, and in the process taking the authors work. This acts towards eliminating the social contract through destructive interference, towards not provide the benefits you enjoy under the social contract while you at the same time breaking it.
There isn't nuance that allows for you to do what you did. Its not a court of law that you can get to argue false justification, its a simple ethical question that includes the authors intent which you exclude, and the license, which you dissemble on.
There are things you can do that can't be forced by society, but the social contract has never been about forcing people. As you say its been about freeing people to act towards the benefit and survival of others.
Part of this is the important choice to know when you should not do something because it breaks that contract and incentivizes destructive outcomes. This is where ethics and reasoning following Method come in. You aren't following Method or Logic here, you follow fallacy.
> If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way ...
The law is not perfect, and in fact many places the rule of law has failed following similar degradation in reasoning that you follow here, which has become known as judicial activism. I've already said what happens generically, so you've been warned even if you don't see it.
The true nature of evil is in the blindness it induces in self and others so they can adopt evil without resistance. I'm not saying you are evil, but this is a very slippery slope that you don't even realize you are on when you've become blind.
To become blind, you have to make a willful choice to be blind, and the nature of perception and your subconscious forces you to ignore anything to the contrary after that, its a basic psychological bias.
We have many psychological blindspots as members of humanity, which is why in many religions they cover behaviors that help avoid adoption of destructive behaviors through those blindspots, and objective tests to know when (in Christianity a part of this is in the 7 virtues, and 7 sins). This has a lot of nuance that few read into.
Wrath for example is the loss of rationality, flawed reasoning meets that definition as a deadly sin when its to the exclusion of all else (i.e. blind).
Complacency, is sloth, most of the rest are primal desires towards destructive ends. You get the idea.
There are those that may claim to embrace these things but have blinded themselves so they don't know when they break them. You generally can't be good in the long run, if you are blind to the bad you do in the short.
You appear to have no resistance to breaking the contract. This is a perceptual blindness, and it disadvantages you, and it disadvantages those who you might induce to do the same, whether it be as a role-model from proximity or otherwise.
> I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", ..., but is not expressed fully.
The author's intent is expressed to sufficient degree that choices can be made to either follow the authors intent if you use their work, or not. Its not a novel construction, so you can build it yourself on your own and then do whatever you want with that creation, that would be the right path to be ethical about this.
You don't seem to make the right choice here. This discussion is irrespective of the subjective definition of what individuals consider open source is. This is a cop out. The author published their expectations, you either follow them or you don't, and undermining those expectations is on the side of you choosing you don't.
To say that the license doesn't supersede the author's words is your opinion. It does, in fact, supersede the request both in law and "socially".
If any requirement or request need be laid upon the software and its use, there are mechanisms for doing that available today and the author willingly chose to try something new. This doesn't negate their request, but it does bring into question the "social contract"; people have certain social expectations of software, particularly when licensed like this, that you seem to ignore or consider null in this argument, which seems unfair and one-sided.
I do believe that this situation is not as cut and dry and morally wrong as you seem to be stating. What of a user that deploys the project without ever reading that specific page of documentation?
Perhaps you and I are debating towards different end states here. Myself towards what a fleshed-out approach to this kind of permissive-license-plus-social-request open-source might look like and you towards ignoring the request of another human being implying an eventual complete breakdown in society.
It's simply untrue that every request from every human being (regarding something they have made or otherwise) must be respected and followed above all else and to think otherwise trends towards its own breakdown of society. Intent and requests are not the be-all-end-all of ethical cooperation that you seem to be arguing for. Does this imply that anarchy and chaos are the answer? No, of course not! As I have tried to indicate, there is more nuance here than your argument makes room for and indeed the lack of nuance in your own argument as you tighten it down further results in its own ethical problems which you seem to be trying to argue into impossibility.
Alas, we humans on an individual and group level will always have mutually exclusive goals and opinions and working through those is part of the human experience - relationships take communication, work, nuance, understanding, and compromise. Absolutism such as you are calling for is the kind of thing that results in societal collapse as well.
In summary, I agree with you that asking the author is the right thing to do here as I _did_ read the documentation thoroughly and I should have done so and not assumed that my little personal git forge was "exempt" from the request. As a result, I have reached out to discuss as requested. I also would say that anyone else that opts to interpret the license literally would also be in the right, though. I also disagree that this issue is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. I also believe the status quo around "open source plus restrictions" (if you can say there is much of one) can be greatly improved and is a discourse worth having.
Hope this is useful to others!