Aral Balkan
Technology is an amplifier and what Big Tech amplifies is fascism.
You want to amplify the opposite? Then build, raise awareness about, and help fund the opposite:
Small Tech.
https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology
#BigTech #SmallTech #fascism #democracy #humanRights #technology
Aral Balkan
@frechdachs Thanks. I’ve been trying to articulate that as simply as possible for a while now; hopefully it works :)
CheekyBadger☭
@aral I like that you stipulated "share-alike" rather than open source, I think this highlights an important distinction between copyleft licences and permissive licences like BSD and MIT, that, as you put it, "if you benefit from technology that has been put into the commons, you must share back"
#OpenSource #MIT #Copyleft #ShareAlike #GPL
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@frechdachs @aral It’s also the point at which I realise that it’s not a crusade that I will be contributing to, which is a shame because I agree with all of the other points.
I’ve written a lot about why I don’t contribute to copyleft projects over the years, so I won’t repeat it all here, but at a high level, it boils down to two points:
Copyleft project licenses always include some conditions that are easy to accidentally violate. For example, if I compile a GPLv2 project and give a friend a binary so that they don’t have to build it themselves, I’ve violated the license. Will anyone take me to court? Almost certainly not, but now we’re in a land of selective enforcement and everyone needs to talk to lawyers to understand when they are compliant, not compliant but probably fine, or not complaint and at risk. I’ve spent a depressing amount of time talking to lawyers about the GPL and the number of things where the conclusion was that it was a technical violation but it would not be in the interests of anyone with standing to sue to take it to court was depressing.
I also contributed to a GPL’d FSF project where we had strong evidence of a company taking the code and distributing modified versions, but the FSF decided that it was too expensive to enforce the license. This is the worst situation because all of the legal restrictions apply to people acting in good faith but not to others because the cost of enforcement is too high.
More importantly, forcing people to cooperate via legal threat never works. People contribute changes to permissively licensed projects because they understand the value of the commons. I’ve seen far more proprietary software written as a result of the GPL than Free Software. Even small companies would rather reimplement something in house than understand the GPL in all of its intricate corner cases and so we end up with them providing no benefit to the commons. In contrast, the evolution I’ve seen many times with permissive software is as follows:
After step five, they are eager and willing contributors to the open ecosystem. With GPL’d projects, this doesn’t happen. They either do an in-house rewrite or they take GPL’d code and have compliance people deal with upstream and regard the license as a cost centre.
There are exceptions to this, but they tend to be projects that already grew to the size where a proprietary reimplementation is not feasible, such as Linux (and, even then, the level of grudging compliance from phone vendors, for example, shows you how little the GPL is actually helping).
Aral Balkan
@david_chisnall @frechdachs “Share alike” is not a complex concept. It just so happens to be incompatible with capitalism and the privatisation and hoarding that goes with it.
Small Tech isn’t concerned with the needs of corporations and neither is it concerned with achieving vertical scale. And we’re not going around burning every permissive license we find either. Small Tech is its own thing and will evolve in its own way. Slowly. At human scale. Sharing as we go.
Aral Balkan
@david_chisnall @frechdachs Here’s all I’m doing: I’m saying “dear corporation, you see this thing that I’ve spent the last however many years of my life working on? You can’t take it and enclose it. You can’t privatise it. I mean, you can, and, if you did, I’d likely not be able to afford to pursue you legally but I could maybe do so in the court of public opinion.”
At the very least, I’m making my intent crystal clear.
It’s not an attempt at purity or perfection. Neither exist.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
@aral @frechdachs It’s not a complex concept, it’s a complex thing to enshrine in legalese. And when you do, you are giving power to lawyers and people who can afford to pay lawyers, not to individuals.
If you want to peg a small tech thing to copyleft, that’s your choice. As someone who has written and released a few hundred thousand lines of code under permissive license, I won’t be joining in. I’ve seen people adopt the position that you are taking (that copyleft is the only true way) and it almost never achieves the goals that are stated.
You’re starting by saying that your licensing ideology is more pure than that of many successful projects. I don’t know how you expect that to build an inclusive environment.
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