Some people volunteer at a food bank or shelter and some people volunteer by writing/maintaining open source code. It's for the common good and volunteerism is a good thing.
You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve food at the local country club. Sure, you're feeding hungry people, but there is something just a little bit wrong about that.
Personally, I'm getting more paid open source work than I have time for, all based on permissive licensing, but I might be something of an outlier.
> You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve food at the local country club.
It's more like volunteering to pave the road in your neighborhood because you want to help your neighbors out, and also to make it easier for your friends to come visit you at your house.
But eventually, some local small businesses realize that they can use the road to get their commercial goods to the market faster. At first, you don't mind because they're not causing much harm. Why not let them use the road?
But eventually some international megacorps hear about the road and start to tell their trucks to use it too. After a while, some of the truck drivers start to loudly complain about the way the road was designed. "This road doesn't let us drive our trucks as fast as we want to. Please fix!"
Next time you're repaving the road, you spend some extra time to make it less curvy and easier for the truck drivers to drive fast, even though you don't own a truck and this doesn't really help your friends or neighbors.
Eventually, even more huge companies start using the road to bring their goods to market. Their complaints get more frequent. "This road isn't designed for our eighteen-wheeler trucks that we'd like to drive through here! Please fix it or we'll start using another road!" And on and on...
Eventually, you realize that you're working for free and this isn't about helping your friends and neighbors anymore. You start to tell friends in other neighborhoods who are considering building their own free public roads not do it (it's just not worth it). You recommend if they want to do it that they at least charge a toll to use the road. That way the road won't be overused by folks who complain and don't give anything back.
After word gets around and some time passes, the world has fewer public roads and the remaining roads require a toll to use.
You could argue that much open source work is like volunteering to serve food at the local country club.
Most of the worlds programming population doesn't live in a US tech center (unfortunately - gib visa plz?). As well as people from developing countries, there are students and hobbyists.
Do not the small developers benefit from open source? Startups that are not making money, even? Personal projects, etc.
The difference between the food bank and this is that food cannot be consumed by everybody, all at once. It's near impossible to make "free" software that cannot be used by companies that are profitable. Who would police "profitability" when there's no money involved? The best you can hope for is to prevent a profitable company from using your code. Chances are, if the code is useful enough, someone else will write something similar without the same restriction.
My take: If you're writing FOSS, you know what you're getting into. If you need the money to do it, you should plan for that.
Does the GPL do enough to protect us from private extraction of the commons? I used to advocate for 0BSD but at this point it seems like we need something like the AGPL or Parity.[0]
I'm one of the contributors to the API Copyleft License. Are you using it for a public project? I'd like to feature that kind of work on https://apicopyleft.com.
Keep reading! That is just the Purpose section, which summarizes the license. The specific sections affecting copyleft are Copyleft, Prototypes, Applications, and Contributing. I think they are slightly easier to read and understanding on the master branch of the development repository: https://github.com/kemitchell/api-copyleft-license/blob/mast...
My gripe with copyleft was that it used copyright, which I wanted to avoid participating in. Unfortunately, this means that you're making it very easy for others to take your work, obfuscate it, and receive copyright protection for their "derivative".
My goal was to remove copyright from my work, but using permissive licenses seemed to instead mean "I'll give up my copyright protection, but you can take my work and receive copyright protection and sue others".
Meanwhile, let's say a company makes billions using some piece of software that costs 10,000$ to write. You saved that company at most 10,000$, no matter how much money they will ever make. Most likely, you only saved them the license cost of the next best commercial option.
If you don't like the idea that your software could be used by someone who could profit from it without giving you anything, don't publish free software. Publish commercial software. That's the best test to see how much your software is actually worth.
Just to clarify, are you speaking for the team to condemn extremism in general, or the specific belief in upholding the U.S. Constitution within the U.S., or something else?
Maybe I should pay attention to the discussion with the community when that occurs, but I'm interested in which "values" you take issue with. Care to share here?
"Upholding the Constitution", among the far right, is dogwhistle for supporting white supremacy or other regressive policies. There's even a fringe political party called the Constitution Party that draws its planks not from the Constitution, the Federalist papers, or other constitutional scholarship -- but the King James Version of the Bible.
Upholding the Constitution can be a dogwhistle for various malign ideas. But there are also people who see, for example, the "living Constitution" jurisprudence as not actually upholding the Constitution, but rather just saying what you want and calling it the law. There are people who see executive orders (whether by Bush, Obama, or Trump) as not the way the country is supposed to be governed, and worry about the constitutional legitimacy of those orders. Probably the majority of the people who worry about such things are conservatives; my feel is that the majority (at a minumum) are not concerned about such issues as a cover for white supremacy.
Note well: I take no position on whether Oath Keepers is using "upholding the Constitution" as a cover for white supremacy.
>But there are also people who see, for example, the "living Constitution" jurisprudence as not actually upholding the Constitution, but rather just saying what you want and calling it the law.
And those people are incorrect. It's incorrect to believe that all modern Constitutional law and Supreme Court decisions are the result of judges and lawmakers simply making up whatever interpretation they like without any basis in, study of, or respect for the Constitution.
The alternative would be to pretend to know in all cases what an eighteenth century philosopher would decide about an issue of law in the context of modern society.
If you'll re-read my post a bit more carefully, you'll see that the word "all" is nowhere in it. Nobody (that I know) believes that " all modern Constitutional law and Supreme Court decisions are the result of judges and lawmakers simply making up whatever interpretation they like without any basis in, study of, or respect for the Constitution." I suppose that bit of hyperbole might serve to make my original statement seem less reasonable; if you did it deliberately, you're putting words in my mouth to try to discredit me, which is pretty scummy.
> The alternative would be to pretend to know in all cases what an eighteenth century philosopher would decide about an issue of law in the context of modern society.
No, the alternative would be to know what they said the rules are.
(Now, I will admit that deciding how the rules they agreed on apply in a specific situation can be very complicated. But I trust "let's look at the rules and see how they apply" more than I trust "interpreting the Constitution in accordance with its original meaning or intent is sometimes unacceptable as a policy matter, and thus that an evolving interpretation is necessary"[1]. The former view makes the Constitution the final law; the latter makes policy the master over the Constitution.)
[1] From the Wikipedia article on "Living Constitution". The quote was marked "citation needed". If you don't think it's an accurate statement of how some judges view the Constitution, make your case.
>No, the alternative would be to know what they said the rules are.
Problem is, parts of the text are maddeningly vague, and they didn't exactly agree in their politics, so a single, simple, objective and provably correct interpretation of those rules is not always possible.
>If you don't think it's an accurate statement of how some judges view the Constitution, make your case.
I do think that's an accurate statement. I disagree with 'people who see, for example, the "living Constitution" jurisprudence as not actually upholding the Constitution, but rather just saying what you want and calling it the law.'
One can disagree with the doctrine of a 'living Constitution' but there is more nuance and thought put behind the rationale than some conservatives want to admit. Both sides believe, in good faith, that what they're doing is upholding the Constitution.
>The former view makes the Constitution the final law; the latter makes policy the master over the Constitution.)
I prefer to see it as the former making the Founding Fathers the master over the Constitution, the latter making the people the master over it. The Constitution is a legal document, not the word of God, and nothing in the Constitution explicitly requires that it be interpreted according to strict originalist intent, so interpreting it either way is equally valid, and equally a matter of politics.
Well, the former makes the people of the Founding Fathers' generation the master over the Constitution (they ratified it). The latter makes the people of this generation the masters over it.
> Problem is, parts of the text are maddeningly vague, and they didn't exactly agree in their politics, so a single, simple, objective and provably correct interpretation of those rules is not always possible.
True.
>>If you don't think it's an accurate statement of how some judges view the Constitution, make your case.
I do think that's an accurate statement. I disagree with 'people who see, for example, the "living Constitution" jurisprudence as not actually upholding the Constitution, but rather just saying what you want and calling it the law.'
The original statement was "interpreting the Constitution in accordance with its original meaning or intent is sometimes unacceptable as a policy matter, and thus that an evolving interpretation is necessary". Deciding that "the original meaning is unacceptable" is exactly "deciding what you want and calling it the law". It's deciding, on the basis of what you think policy should be, what the Constitution should have said.
Let me put it this way: Trump may, before he's done, nominate three Supreme Court justices. Do you want those justices to decide based on what they think is "acceptable as a policy matter"? Or do you want them to be bound by what the text says?
> One can disagree with the doctrine of a 'living Constitution' but there is more nuance and thought put behind the rationale than some conservatives want to admit.
I will admit that - for at least some of those who hold that position. Others... their behavior seems to indicate that they want to rule over the Constitution, not to faithfully interpret it.
> so interpreting it either way is equally valid
Is it? We don't accept that reasoning with contracts, why should we with the Constitution?
(That is, if you have a contract, and you try to interpret the terms in ways that are outside the bounds of the words of the contract, a court isn't going to care how much you see the contract as a living document. They also aren't going to care how much you care about original intent. They're going to care about the words on the paper. I've seen it happen in court, with one side arguing creative meaning plus intent, and the other destroying them with the actual words.)
Nice discussion. I'll leave you the last word; I'm out for the next two days.
>Let me put it this way: Trump may, before he's done, nominate three Supreme Court justices. Do you want those justices to decide based on what they think is "acceptable as a policy matter"? Or do you want them to be bound by what the text says?
If I support decisions by previous courts, such as Roe V. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, then the intellectually honest position would be to concede that whomever Trump nominates has the right to do the same. I may not like it, but I do believe that is the Court's prerogative.
I don't think it's harmful to consider updated interpretations of the Constitution per se, although particular decisions can do harm even when they correctly reflect the attitudes of the time (as with Plessy V. Ferguson and segregation.) But then, obviously wrong interpretations can also be reversed. I think that we're a stronger democracy for being able to ask these questions, and consider the Constitution as evolving philosophy as much as a legal document, than if we were prevented from doing so.
>Is it? We don't accept that reasoning with contracts, why should we with the Constitution?
Well... the Constitution isn't a contract. If it were, it would be far more precise and verbose in its language, and you wouldn't have entire bodies of scholarship around the meaning of a comma.
But here we are in 2018, in the age of the internet, global surveillance, 3d printed guns, genome sequencing and a thousand other things the Founders would probably never have conceived of. If we remain bound only by the original intent of the original definition of the words of the Constitution when interpreting challenges and questions of Constitutional law, then I'm afraid the result is going to be that Constitution becoming less and less relevant to modern society.
