Comment by InsideOutSanta
8 hours ago
It's genuinely mind-blowing to me that software can do something obviously bad, someone can point it out, and then someone will link to the license file to say they have the right to do it.
That's such an obvious category mistake that I'm not sure how to respond. It almost feels like a bad-faith interpretation of Wichary's original point.
Right. It is weird that this has to be explained, but let's make it clear: in the Before Times, probably anytime up to at least the late '00s, probably approximately no-one in or around free or open source software would have endorsed the idea that the legal disclaimers completely free even the most mainstream, self-publicising, broad-userbase open source projects from any moral or ethical obligation to have even the slightest concern to ensure that their software doesn't hurt or betray its non-paying users, even in the most harmful ways. And if one of the many and often vocal FOSS opponents of the time had started claiming that this is what open-source developers really believe they'd have rightly been seen as having veered off into the lunatic fringe. And that's because it's a, frankly, bonkers idea which is radically detached from normal human understanding of the social and moral role and obligations of volunteers, voluntary organisations, charitable givers or gift-givers. And also because it's a wildly counterproductive idea to put out there if you're hoping to increase FOSS adoption.
That does leave the question of why this idea has started to take off more recently. Part of the answer is certainly that Rich Hickey, disgracefully, set the ball rolling in this direction, and that many others have welcomed it as one weird trick and one pat answer for all the worsening problems of developer burnout. Unfortunately it seems hard to dismiss the idea that it's also social breakdown driven by a broader trend, as over time we move further and further from the pre-'60s "neurotic society" of people obsessed with duty and social conformity (often with oppressive or destructive results, to be sure) into the "psychopathic society" in which even people who don't themselves merit a Cluster B diagnosis have internalised narcissistic and psychopathic attitudes.
Equally mindblowing that folks feel someone hacking on open source software has an obligation to do anything the way they feel it needs to be done when the whole point is that anyone gets to do more or less what they want with the code.
You can't have both.
They get to do more or less what they want with the software, and others get to say more or less what they want about that. What's wrong with deciding they've crossed a line, being bothered by that, and warning others? Nobody's trying to get the law involved, or maliciously retaliate against them, or anything like that.
I published my comment for free, and yet you are criticizing it.
I think you are objecting to OP’s “duty of care” wording which could be interpreted as suggesting a legal obligation. Nobody in this thread is really arguing that open source developers have a legal obligation to do this and to not do that. We are just saying they should do this and should not do that.
> has an obligation to do anything the way they feel it needs to be done
> anyone gets to do more or less what they want with the code
so if the software had explicitly installed a root kit, you'd say the same?
If you give out free soup, you get to poison it too?
"My software ran rm -rf / but it's GPL so sucks to be you"