this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Why are you talking about Creative Commons? Everyone knows this isn’t for code (hence Fedora kicking out CC0 code) & everyone knows NC has a loose definition (& good intentions). There are plenty of options in licenses in the post-open source, copyfair, copyfarleft, & such that work for software that are not considered “free” or “open” (where open is more corporate than free, which free is obviously the better one) but still allow users to modify read & usually modify the source. These have their flaws—specifically the incompatibility with free software—but the heart is in the right place in trying to address the exploitation; I encourage the research & development of licenses in these spaces to help the commons. I, as a non-corporation, wish to defend not shame developers from choosing non-‘free’ licenses in these & similar categories for their software. This defense of alternative licensing isn’t moving a goalpost & always was the primary premise.
Because (from the article):
Yeah. It's not supposed to be for code. Didn't stop the Duckstation developer.
I would have to evaluate those licenses on a case by case basis, but I suspect I would find the vast majority of them okay enough. But again, this is moving the goalposts. I was expressing my concerns issues with the CC BY NC ND, but you have changed the discussion to be about other licenses. Although interesting, they are not relevant since the DuckStation license is not those.
I still think government funding for free software is the correct solution, however. I generally find all of the post open and whatnot licenses have restrictions can be problematic, or loopholes that can be abused to get out of the "good" restrictions. I noted a while ago with one of the licenses that demand that corporations making over some amount giving up a percentage of their profits, that Google used to do a scheme where Alphabet (parent company of google) was the actual owner of the google logo, and then they rented it to Google at an absurdly high price, in order to artificially lower Google's profits. I think that it would be too simple for the extremely wealthy companies to do something similar and use post-open licensed software without consequence.
Taxing corporations is hard, but having every individual entity behind a software try to extract resources from a corporation will be harder. "Divide and conquer". My understanding is that license violations are a Civil case, meaning you have to spend money on lawyers and other legal things and... you would be going against some of the richest entities in the world in a court where money is basically a win button.
And of course, allowing society to continue to rely on proper Free Software licenses, ensures software freedom is preserved.
No. If I cannot modify the source, then I don't really view a difference between it and proprietary software. Both the OSI and Free Software Foundation at least require the ability to modify the source code, in order for a license to actually count at FOSS under their guidelines — and I agree with them. Code I cannot modify, is a piece of my computer I do not own.
Duckstation license choice of CC BY-NC-ND is dumb for software for a number of reason—wouldn’t argue that. But there are software licenses in a similar vein, inspired by CC NC but actually for, ya know, software, that do what they want without being fundamentally problematic—and these were the “such licenses” I was talking about the whole time & should be tested/trialed. I think you misunderstood my phrasing.
No modification is a bummer, but I could argue for in either direction more strongly a) some source you can modify but you can’t contribute (like Microsoft’s closed-off Language Server Protocol) which is different level of restriction that flies in the spirit of having a open license making ‘modification’ not open enough since you can’t really get all downstream implementations to support your fork or b) I would be happier being able to see the code such as the encryption used that would be better than nothing (like whatever Discord is trying to tell users it’s definitely-not-back-doored E2EE setup is… trust us). “ND” is better than nothing & imperfect, but it can be seen as a spectrum.
CC0 is awful for code. I didn't understand why until reading this https://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-review_lists.opensource.org/2012-February/001431.html (you can click the thread button to see the full thread as well).
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.en#limitations
The only license/declaration approved by both the FSF and OSI for putting something into the public domain while having a permissive fallback license (for jurisdictions without public domain) is the Unlicense. If you know of others please let me know.