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lancemantis posted:i have bad news Its basically impossible to prevent people from actively stealing your code and knowing they're stealing it. But making a lawyer say "we're not legally allowed to use this" is an 80% solution.
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# ? Jan 31, 2020 23:19 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 23:13 |
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rotor posted:Its basically impossible to prevent people from actively stealing your code and knowing they're stealing it. But making a lawyer say "we're not legally allowed to use this" is an 80% solution. The problem is if the enforcement is "or we get sued" that does jack and/or poo poo for an individual
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# ? Jan 31, 2020 23:34 |
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Captain Foo posted:The problem is if the enforcement is "or we get sued" that does jack and/or poo poo for an individual there’s ambulance chasers for everything - if it’s a slam dunk case and you have no resources it’s possible to get someone to do it on commission
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:06 |
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I mean it’s not like busybox had a lot of money to kick the poo poo out of dozens of garbage hardware manufacturers, for example
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:08 |
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Progressive JPEG posted:there’s ambulance chasers for everything - if it’s a slam dunk case and you have no resources it’s possible to get someone to do it on commission imo there are no slam dunks in software law because there aren't enough judges or jurors who actually understand what the gently caress is going on
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:15 |
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Progressive JPEG posted:I mean it’s not like busybox had a lot of money to kick the poo poo out of dozens of garbage hardware manufacturers, for example though I'll admit I'm not that familiar with this
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:16 |
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Captain Foo posted:though I'll admit I'm not that familiar with this yeah i'd like to hear more about this
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:33 |
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busybox is gpl licensed and hardware manufacturers were frequently not making available the busybox source for builds that they were distributing with their hardware, even after being contacted by busybox to fix it. it was usually real obvious by just looking at firmware upgrade blobs for the hardware in question the following have all been owned by busybox, this is not a complete list: - monsoon multimedia - xterasys, high-gain antennas - verizon - bell microproducts, super micro - best buy, samsung, westinghouse, jvc, western digital, bosch, phoebe micro, humax, comtrend, dobbs-stanford, versa, zyxel, astak, gci - extreme networks from reading up on it, sounds like they were usually settled out of court for a cash settlement
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 00:54 |
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rotor posted:I think getting a good license up front is good but I think a clause that the author retains the right to deny use to anyone at any time is the only practical way to actually avoid having your code used for unethical purposes. an ethical person would not use your library in their program, because while they too might want to control use of their code, they would not want you and other random people to be able to pull the rug on the people they grant use of their code to the net effect is everyone mostly writes everything themselves, and any collaborative project gets denial-of-used to hell at the first falling out and has to be rewritten
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 01:24 |
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looking forward to choose between the entirely incompatible israel and palestine supporting tech stacks
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 01:30 |
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suffix posted:looking forward to choose between the entirely incompatible israel and palestine supporting tech stacks this exists and the dividing line is called ITAR
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 01:51 |
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suffix posted:an ethical person would not use your library in their program, because while they too might want to control use of their code, they would not want you and other random people to be able to pull the rug on the people they grant use of their code to sounds like job security comrade
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 02:07 |
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suffix posted:an ethical person would not use your library in their program if someone won't use my code because they're worried that I'd yank their rights to use my library because of their ethical stance then I think the system works.
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 02:42 |
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like i don't really think "lots of companies use my code" is a worthwhile goal
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 03:12 |
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rotor posted:if someone won't use my code because they're worried that I'd yank their rights to use my library because of their ethical stance then I think the system works. A person who considers using your software doesn't know you or anything about you. From their perspective, you might turn around in a year's time and say, "I've just realised that people with green eyes are Beelzebub's children, and therefore since you have green eyes you are now forbidden to use my software". That is why nobody who is paying attention will use your software if you reserve in perpetuity the right to arbitrarily deny them access to it. rotor posted:like i don't really think "lots of companies use my code" is a worthwhile goal There is an implicit assumption here that the only entities that might use your code are companies, not other individuals. While the existence of companies that might exploit your code may loom large in your consideration for good reason, the lack of availability of your code is at best an inconvenience to them. Does the lack of availability of your code to other individuals (amateur coders, say) matter to you at all?
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 16:04 |
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Hammerite posted:Does the lack of availability of your code to other individuals (amateur coders, say) matter to you at all? if they’re feeling that entitled to someone’s library or whatever then they should try going outside
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 21:15 |
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fwiw the earlier thing that I had relicensed is an end user product rather than a library so it’s really got no reason to need a particular license in order to be useful to people the math is a bit different if you’re making a library, but making libraries is also a huge thankless pita where the best case scenario is a bunch of morons regularly demanding you reorder the cosmos for free in order to support their niche use cases which is why I’m not writing libraries
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 21:21 |
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Progressive JPEG posted:if they’re feeling that entitled to someone’s library or whatever then they should try going outside what a weird thing to say! the issue is how rotor feels about it, not how anyone else feels about it. If rotor's attitude is that they can go gently caress themselves, then so be it! the question was whether that really is how they feel about it.
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# ? Feb 1, 2020 23:45 |
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it’s true that most companies would look at these licenses and think “it’s not worth our time to maybe get sued over this” but if they actually want to use the software, they will just ignore the ethics clauses because those elements are extremely non-justiciable and therefore legally might as well not exist in the license
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# ? Feb 2, 2020 00:44 |
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At some point maintainers decided to change the license for the Erlang language from the EPL ("Erlang Public License", a rewrite of the MPL to please Swedish lawyers) to Apache2. What they did is found all the contributors since the 90s, tried to contact them all, had them sign an agreement (which pretty much everyone did). What about the few people they couldn't contact or reach out? They felt they did enough to be fair to everyone, and if someone is truly unhappy they can sue Ericsson.
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# ? Feb 2, 2020 04:04 |
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yeah the llvm relicensing has done something similar — with a few years less history, but probably more contributors — except they've been promising to do a black-box rewrite of anything sourced from someone they can't convince to relicense / assign copyright
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# ? Feb 2, 2020 04:22 |
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Hammerite posted:There is an implicit assumption here that the only entities that might use your code are companies, not other individuals. While the existence of companies that might exploit your code may loom large in your consideration for good reason, the lack of availability of your code is at best an inconvenience to them. Does the lack of availability of your code to other individuals (amateur coders, say) matter to you at all? Yes but not nearly as much as preventing unethical use of it. If these individuals think i may go crazy and deny the license to green-eyed people, they're free to do what individuals have always done: pirate it, duplicate it with trivial modifications, or (gasp) write their own.
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# ? Feb 2, 2020 21:34 |
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turns out AGPL has a huge loophole:quote:13. Remote Network Interaction... loophole: if you leave the program as-is and just wrap it behind a shim or proxy that changes behavior or adds functionality then you’re good to go turns out there’s a reason mongodb gave up on dual licensing with agpl and instead wrote their own license meanwhile OSI, stewards of licenses that haven’t seen an update in at least a decade, pretend everything is fine
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# ? Feb 9, 2020 17:37 |
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yes lets all do what mongodb has, the database for idiots
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 02:16 |
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point being that the OSI is completely loving up the stated reason for their existence by ignoring any license that isn’t at least 20 years old turns out the software development ecosystem has changed a fair bit in that time, and by ignoring modern problems in open software, OSI are effectively causing the very “license proliferation” that they claim to be so worried about if they cared they’d just pick up and declare a “standard” license for all these developers who don’t want to get hosed by amazon
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# ? Feb 10, 2020 02:56 |
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reuse of open source code as depriving developers of experience, and depriving users of better rewrites of things:quote:Duplicating effort, not reusing work product, makes good software. Because duplicating effort, not reusing work product, makes good programmers. Technical progress is people progress. Openness makes software better if it makes programmers better.
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 15:30 |
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brb rolling my own crypto library
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 16:08 |
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I think that dude is a nice developer who got poo poo on by lkml but I barely read it tbh
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 16:12 |
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the abstraction you learned at is bad, I learned at is good i think there’s value in understanding lower level but better programmer feel is not worth dealing with a bespoke http server in every loving program
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 16:14 |
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is this the author of the npm package blue?
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 17:34 |
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There's also value in diversity of components (i.e. not all the components have the same implementations, therefore not all the underlying bugs and issues are shared across all users), and there's no way to learn like reinventing for sure. I've been through that pattern in many projects and it's interesting to find that a rewrite from first principles lets you take new approaches that are cleaner in some general case, but then necessarily shittier for an edge case you hadn't considered. And the edge cases vary between various people's implementations, so the skeletons are all very varied and into different closets. It's a kind of fun phenomenon.
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 17:46 |
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I've been linked to a paper called Culpable Control and the Psychology of Blame, which tries to give an explanatory (more than prescriptive) take on how blame is generally attributed. Haven't gone through it at this point but it looks hella interesting and tries to borrow from both moral philosophy and legal frameworks in trying to unifying the vision.
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# ? Feb 18, 2020 18:29 |
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there's a v2.0 of the hippocratic license out now - its moved from being MIT with an additional clause tacked on to being a mix of mostly original terms mixed with a sprinkling of MIT boilerplate. it sounds like the license itself still needs work but it feels like its getting there
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# ? Feb 23, 2020 09:13 |
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also found the Parity License, which is copyleft except without any of the easily abused "distribution" , "linking", or "modified version" loopholes of GPL/AGPL. if you use software under this license then gently caress you, you have 30 days to publish it and everything you use it with. another neat thing is the license itself is pretty much plain english
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# ? Feb 23, 2020 09:17 |
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Progressive JPEG posted:also found the Parity License, which is copyleft except without any of the easily abused "distribution" , "linking", or "modified version" loopholes of GPL/AGPL. if you use software under this license then gently caress you, you have 30 days to publish it and everything you use it with. another neat thing is the license itself is pretty much plain english that "excuse" section sounds like it could be abused to hell and back
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# ? Feb 23, 2020 16:58 |
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carry on then posted:that "excuse" section sounds like it could be abused to hell and back eh it'd mean that nobody knows theyre using it (and nobody is snitching on them) so seems kinda like a tree falling in woods situation and i imagine its better to lay out specific steps for resolving the violation than not i also imagine 30 days is enough time for them to realize theyre hosed and to pull out their checkbook to pay for an exception
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# ? Feb 24, 2020 08:53 |
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i want some sort of villain license where the particular software can ONLY be used for evil
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# ? Feb 25, 2020 17:20 |
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oh so raytheon license then
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# ? Feb 25, 2020 18:58 |
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lancemantis posted:oh so raytheon license then lol
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# ? Feb 25, 2020 19:07 |
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# ? Apr 25, 2024 23:13 |
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hippocratic license now has a v2.1 and has moved quite a bit from its “mit plus a clause or two” origins it’s might actually be getting into the territory of not necessarily being a poison pill for commercial use, adding a bit about “Hague Rules on Business and Human Rights Arbitration” for arbitrating disagreements one interesting thing, that doesn’t really relate to the ethics bits, is: “Licensee must cause any modified versions of the Software to carry prominent notices stating that Licensee changed the Software.”
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# ? Apr 14, 2020 10:09 |