Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Tuesday, 19-Nov-2024 05:57:52 JST
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if it is as good a guiding principle as you and I seem to believe it is, it had better be adopted voluntarily by societies at large in democratic ways, not by decree of tyrant author-ities
this is exactly where the attempted analogy with copyleft falls apart: copyright law, widely adopted in democratic societies (to my dismay, but that's another long story), grants authors powers to stop anyone else from adapting, distributing and publishing works of their authorship. copyleft gives up these powers, enabling downstream recipients to have freedom, so that they can control their own computing and do whatever they wish with the software. but copyleft does not grant intermediaries power to deny freedoms of downstream recipients. it doesn't prohibit that either: copyright does. remove copyright, and copyleft becomes ineffective: nobody would need a license to adapt or distribute any more, so the delimitations to the permissions put forth in the license text are irrelevant. that's a feature, not a bug.
but unethical-source licenses exploit another bug, in people's understanding of how copyright works. people have been misled to believe that a license is required to run software, and laypeople, misguided by that belief, have tried to apply copyleft-like constraints to something that is not exclusively reserved to authors. when it comes to running software, copyright law only requires that the copy be obtained legally, so the provisions in unethical-source licenses that attempt to constrain the right to execute are about as inoperant as copyleft would be under no copyright.
so, you see, it's a misguided analogy because it purports to impose in an author-itarian way something that societies should adopt democratically and collectively; it's a false analogy because it fails to understand the primary purpose of enabling and respecting freedom and autonomy, disabling and countering an unjust law no further than needed to that end, while leaving the effects of the unjust law in place to not empower abusers; and it's broken because, failing to understand how copyright and copyleft work, unethical-source licenses are ineffective, misleading, and fail entirely to serve their stated purpose.
they're a well-meant disaster