On open source licenses and FOSS

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from Why are Creative Commons 'Non Commercial' licenses not Open Source and a big problem for hardware & product design - Mifactori

Blockquote Also it is worth to mention: The Open Source Initiative is an NGO and owns the trademark “Open Source” . It allows others to use the trademark as long as they use an open source compatible license for their work. It is thinkable that you risk to be sued when you use “open source” and have the wrong license next to it.

The words and actions of the open source initiative seem to be in direct conflict here. What I mean by open source is a far larger and older idea than anything that can be trademarked as ‘intellectual property’. the fundamental idea to my understanding of open source and the tenets of hacking culture in general is not just that information and ideas should be free if their ‘legal owners’ feel fit but that information and ideas are free. Of course there are power structures that will threaten individuals with ‘legal violence’ if you go against these concepts. This is ridiculous and I do not have any interest in explicitly or implicitly supporting an initiative that acts in ways which uphold these ideas.

To be as explicit as possible: what ‘open sourcetm’ says as far as i can parse is: “the fundamental concept of private ownership of ideas is entirely valid and we will use this power structure to threaten dissent with legal violence. Taking that into account if you want to make some of ‘your’ ideas free it is necessary to play by the rules of this system and act to uphold the basic concept of private ownership of ideas”

what i am saying by open source is: “the ideas are all free. they don’t belong to me, they never belonged to anyone, and they never will belong to anyone. Many power structures can and will act in ways to restrict this and they will all fail. Only by delegitimizing the basic concept of owning ideas can we remove the power from those structures which profit from intellectual property”

to be even more explict: i dont believe in private property, capitalism, consumerism, democracy, communism, or despotism. I don’t beleive in the legitimacy of any legal systems based on any of these structures either.

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While I fully support the author doing whatever they want with their work, the approach of not giving a damn and not displaying any license is counter productive.

So please, don’t claim ownership, don’t use any license at all, but have a notice that states that your work is public domain because otherwise you’re playing along with licensing which is the opposite of what you’re trying to do, isn’t it?

Edit:

Also - screw the OSI. xD

Also http://www.wtfpl.net/ or Unlicense - Wikipedia

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Blockquote not displaying any license is counter productive.

again i have to disagree. much of what props up power structures is belief. actively fighting against structures by using the same tools by which they maintain power serves to increase belief in their power. just ignoring the fuck out of them is a far more powerful form of protest than most people think

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Hmm, OK, suit yourself but when has ignoring anything ever really fixed anything?

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I mean simply changing the disclaimer on the bottom of your page to the public domain open source software and educational material would be enough :slight_smile:

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when has ignoring anything ever really fixed anything?

when a power structure is based primarily on large scale belief systems then ignoring them is fundamental to removing them. In a very huge way the decline of the catholic church as the ultimate arbiter of political power in western europe was largely due to individuals ignoring the doctorine in their day to day lives and actions. its a much less sexier proposition than aggressive protest and does not follow the standard western historical narrative of ‘great men doing big things’ but i believe that actively ignoring things (meaning that it actually translates in terms of actions) is a massively powerful way to enact change

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@andrei_jay i think part of the concern is that since none of this information is on your website, people could look at it and conjecture that you are letting your work fall into the standard default of copyright ownership. you also use the term open source on your website without explaining what it means to you. perhaps you could create a page that outlines some of your thoughts that you have shared here so that it is available to people who view your website and wonder if they can copy or distribute your materials?

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makes sense, i avoid proslytizing as much as possible as that seems like one of the most counterproductive methods of changing thought and activity patterns (compared to leading by example and action) but a quiet hypertext link from ‘open source’ seems reasonable.

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I don’t really have answers here, but I want to point out that putting out your work completely unprotected might mean that ‘the bad guys’ come along, copy it and release it as their own, and then use the legal system to block others - and maybe even you, even though you did it first - from putting out a derivative or similar work. At which point the onus is back on you to defend yourself, even though you chose not to be a part of the system in the first place. It’s shitty all-round :frowning: If you go down this route then I think the only workable approaches are to attempt to deconstruct the system itself - which is almost certainly impossible at this juncture - or decide to operate outside of the law altogether, which has fairly obvious potential ramifications.

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the thing is im pretty sure that no matter what kind of ‘liscence’ or ‘patent’ or ‘trademark’ i could get for my work, if some big bad corporation wants to take it and use it for profit they could do it no problem, and absolutely financially ruin me for life in the process if they cared to. even if i thought that ideas could be owned, i have absolutely no faith in any legal system for protection as wealth seems to win out no matter what.

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The underlying discussion here (which I think is key) around ownership is actually one of personal accountability: morally, what do I owe others? If I owe nothing to anyone else then the idea of copyright seems to be fair - I did the work, I should take 100% of the advantage of it. But of course that’s nonsensical, because others always did supporting groundwork. If nothing else then I owe my very existence to my mother, and all those who supported her, and so on. But beyond that, for anything non-trivial there’s always going to be a tool or a consumable or knowledge or an opportunity that’s come from someone else. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum. We begin and live our lives in debt to others. The only way we can get to a place where taking advantage from something we’ve done is morally justifiable is where we have already paid back all of our debts to others first, and that’s a huge amount of effort. Think about simply driving from point A to point B - you are benefitting from the effort that went into making your car, and building the road, and so on. It’s an impossibly complicated equation, and at some point people just draw an arbitrary line and say “I don’t care about my debt to that person because it’s too indirect.”

Andrei, do the thoughts I’ve written above relate to why you feel that ownership is an inherently unfair/unreasonable thing?

Note: I have a personal definition of “morality” that essentially equates it with fairness and honestly. It’s important to keep that in mind, because if your definition differs then what I’ve written about may not make sense.

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no idea happens in a vaccuum, everything is dependent on something which came before it. I absolutely do not think that we are begin our lives or live our lives ‘in debt.’ the prevalance of metaphors like this is kind of an example what i’m saying about how ingrained capitalism and private property is in western societies. I don’t think that ownership of ideas is inherently unfair or unreasonable, i think that history shows that no matter how much anyone might want to think that they can claim ownership of a concept, it just wont work. information essentially wants to be shared, and the more useful it is the stronger it spreads. not only that but the more that everyone works to help share useful information, the better off everyone is as a whole. so what is the point of ever trying to restrict the flow of information? short term profiting off of manufactured scarcity is just about the only motivation i can see. short term profiting off of manufactured scarcity seems to basically sum up a lot of the global capitalist economy at this point in time as well which probably is not a coincidence.

some mathematicians believe that mathematical truths and entities essentially have an existence outside of human thought, and that no one ever ‘invents’ theorems or ‘builds’ structures, they can only be discovered. the usefulness of any kind of theory like this which really cannot be proved or tested in any kind of mathematical or scientific manner is pretty much just up to individuals to decide whether or not using this model of ideas living in their own ‘idea space’ matches up with their perception of the world and provides a decent framework for operating. this concept of ideas being alive outside of human thought and having their own independent structure and, to a certain extent, agendas has been and continues to be an incredibly useful framework for me, and serves as the basis of much of my worldview.

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i feel like the topic of open source - or any attempt to break out of the box of capitalist ideas of intellectual property etc can really quickly turn into a rabbit hole of ideological discussion. i’m not opposed to having these kinds of discussions here but i feel there is a limit to it being the best venue for it. for example i try to operate in a way which contributes toward dismantling certain power structures and hierarchies. these powers are also responsible for the creation of many types of laws. historically many important movements and influential people have opted not to follow certain laws which they feel are unjust. however there obviously are potential repercussions to that and this is an extremely public and searchable forum, so i personally might not want to go too far into detail about my own views on the matter. i feel like having this forum be very open is nice for the intention we created it for, sharing creative and technical information and ideas. as i said this can totally be discussed here and is somewhat relevant but just wanted to mention this…

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Thanks Andrei, I appreciate you sharing your perspective and thoughts. I absolutely agree with your points on manufactured scarcity.

Paloma, sadly I can’t find anyone in my (admitted limited) circle who is interested in discussions like this so I take it wherever I can get it :slight_smile: I do take your point, though - from memory I think you’re USA based? If I was there I would certainly be very circumspect about what I was saying in a permanent public forum right now, given the current socio-political climate. We live in ‘interesting times’ and it sure feels like we’re on the cusp of some huge upheavals, and who knows which way it will go or how we might be held accountable for our words in the future, given the examples of the past :frowning:

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Hi all,

I’m finding this a very interesting discussion ful of varied points.

I just wanted to offer pointers which would clarify some things regarding “Open Source” and FLOSS. Especially in the context of resistance to power structures and systemic opression via concepts and laws in connection to intellectual property, copyright and trademarks.

‘Open Source’ is a very wide term (also a trademark, but I think that’s irrelevant) - it includes work licenced with the intention to give freedom to society - to “do good” for everyone, but also work licenced with intention to give maximum freedom to individual and entrepreneur/companies (well exploited by google and many others). so there’s a wide spectrum of ways how to ‘open-source’ something.

I think the most known is the difference between OSI and FSF, where the former has an intention to foster inovation and exploitation of software by individuals and companies in a (neo?)liber/tarial/an way (BSD-syle permissive licences, do anything you want), and the latter wants to prevent proprietization, and instead gives certain use and distribution conditions in order to foster more software to be/come ‘libre’ (free as in speech, not beer). [more]

An important note here is that in order to make software “libre” (and therefore protect it from being ‘closed’ and not distributed as widely as possible), legaly this is an upgrade on top of copyright. In other words, to copyleft something, it needs a copyright (yes, ownership) to be legaly binding. AFAIK software protected by GNU GPL was not tried in court because the licence is that strong that companies that were notified about breaching the licence stoped using that software or open source GPL’ed their part of software (as demanded by that licence).

Of course there’s also public domain that gives no obligation to anyone to NOT ‘close’ any derivatives (forks, upgrades).

yes, this was a good point in the 80s and 90s. But in these times information/data is (also) the new oil for the corporations and surveillance capitalism. my own answer is this "the point of trying to restrict the flow of information (software) is to channel it to those in need, and restrict it when it wants to flow in the direction of exploitative greedy multinationals who don’t pay taxes and don’t care about anything but the flow of cash. In this sense, there’s a very interesting proposition called Peer Production Licence which at its core has the idea to allow all copying of software/creative work only to certain types of users: commoners, cooperatives and nonprofits

The peer production license is an example of the Copyfair type of license, in which only other commoners, cooperatives and nonprofits can share and re-use the material, but not commercial entities intent on making profit through the commons without explicit reciprocity . This fork on the original text of the Creative Commons non-commercial variant makes the PPL an explicitly anti-capitalist version of the CC-NC. It only allows commercial exploitation by collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators, and where any surplus is distributed equally among them (and not only into the hands of owners, shareholders or absentee speculators).

See more at Peer Production License - P2P Foundation and Copyfarleft - P2P Foundation .

EDIT: I just want to add my position the points above: I personally think that if I want to contribute to a different world I need to publish my creative work and software under a licence that prevents the closure of the commons, a licence that prevents exploitation of workers for commercial exploitation. Not attaching a licence to my work/software means (posibily) criminalizing users of my work. Putting it in a Public Domain or BSD licences or CC-BY (or to a lesser extent CC-BY-SA) gives my material out in the wild for exploitation/extraction of value by capitalism. Using CC-BY-SA-NC is very close to ‘perfect’, but robs those in need to reuse and earn from derivation - with ‘those in need’ I mean “collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators”. I really like ideas in the Peer Production Licence and want to use it on my work.

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I haven’t heard of PPL before, but having just given it a read I must say it looks great!

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PPL is part of the Telekommunist Manifesto The Telekommunist Manifesto | Telekommunisten

I love what these guys are doing. I’ve been to one of their workshops on CCC and it was pretty cool. :slight_smile:

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all makes sense, i think i’m just coming from a radically different set of assumptions than most folks regarding this world. Legal systems and copyright law seems to primarily exist as tools to enable wealthy and powerful entities to exploit less wealthy and powerful entities with state sponsored threats of violence. choosing to work within that set of restrictions is for me an implicit support for the entire system itself. freedom of information for me is not a decade based haxxor trend, it is a description of how information actually works and travels over the history of human intelligence.

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I totally get it and in some way the resistance I sense in your attitudes resonates with my set of values, and I also think there’s a personal freedom of choice and there’s discussion on different perspective, and debate can be civil and respectful.

I didn’t want to imply that “information wants to be free” is a trend that is passe (and I can see and agree with your argument about information travel over the history of human intelligence). To me, personally - and I was actually involved in pre-internet networks at the end of 80s, and was strong proponent of Barbrook’s Cybercommunism Manifesto in late 90s -, seems that the idea of freedom of information is already embeded in todays’ analysis of the techno-social, and there’s an upgrade in a sense that it matters a lot which information is important to be shared and where – in these, new and different times, post web-3.0. I’m just thinking about [doxxing vs cable leaks] for example. or [data harvesting and surveillance by E.corp (Google Facebook Amazon etc) vs data on global covid infections], etc.

for a long time I wanted to simply avoid all the system that is in place regarding copyright, and I’m still against the notions of IP (intellectual property), but at some point I’ve decided to work against it by being loud about what creators and artists really want (in my opinion: audience and food on the table) and that the system that we have is not fair and needs to change into one that gives content creators (blarh, hate that expression) possiblity to spread their work, one that also gives something like a minimum wage, in a form of UBI or similar - in other words guaranteed decent life conditions, and would prevent extraction and exploitation into wealth accumulation based on intellectual property ownership. this change is not possible to do overnight or via revolution (bitcoin I’m looking at you) and needs a lot of analytical work, activism and advocacy.

Lawrence Lessig, creator of Creative Commons licences, said early in the process, that this process - using copyright to release some rights - is a patch on a system that needs a radical reform. I see GNU GPL in a similar way - it exploits an existing right to demand virality of the libre software (share-alike - not present in BSD). these are all modifications of something that is flawed at the core: ownership, property. all good artists know: the song is not artists ‘invention’ in the vacuum, rather it’s the song that has found the artist. (cf Nick Cave)

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most def! appreciate yr input most certainly.