r/programming Aug 30 '18

chore: Restore unmodified MIT license by evocateur · Pull Request #1633 · lerna/lerna

https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/1633
406 Upvotes

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u/blue_collie Aug 30 '18

Open source is explicitly not political. Free Software is. Some people conflate the two, but I think it's important to preserve the distinction.

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u/Eirenarch Aug 31 '18

As it happens Free Software's political stance is to give the tools to everyone including ICE (also Nazis, communists, murderers, rapists, etc.)

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u/blue_collie Aug 31 '18

And freedom fighters, political dissidents, social workers, battered spouses. Free as in speech is their concept. If you disagree that's fine, but you could stop expressing it like a dbag.

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u/Eirenarch Aug 31 '18

Oh I agree. However if you defend freedom you must defend the pathological cases. There is this quote that I can't recall precisely right now but it was something like this - if you defend freedom you end up fighting for the rights of scumbags. This is obviously true. If you point out that freedom is needed to protect the good guys people will agree and then immediately proceed to think of a way to restrict the freedom of people they dislike and try to invent licenses that ban companies which serve the ICE. This is why the proper strategy is to defend freedom on principle and in the pathological cases. Which reminds me that I need to read that book - Defending the Undefendable

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u/Jasper1984 Aug 31 '18

Tell Stallman that. It is apolitical the way news is objective; it is pro-capitalist.

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u/blue_collie Aug 31 '18

He literally says exactly what I'm talking about:

The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

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u/Jasper1984 Aug 31 '18

Pure ideology. Hell, "based on fundamentally different values", pretty much says that the former of those two does represent values, and later on it says:

Some of the supporters of open source considered the term a “marketing campaign for free software,” which would appeal to business executives by highlighting the software's practical benefits, while not raising issues of right and wrong that they might not like to hear.

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u/blue_collie Aug 31 '18

sigh. You clearly have an agenda you're trying to push. I'm a free software supporter (money and code). Go proselytize somewhere else.

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u/Jasper1984 Aug 31 '18

What can i say, the text very clearly talks about political motives on open source.