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Open Source Devs Reverse Decision to Block ICE Contractors From Using Software (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard:
Less than 24 hours after a software developer revoked access to Lerna, a popular open-source software management program, for any organization that contracted with U.S. immigrations and Customs Enforcement, access has been restored for any organization that wishes to use it and the developer has been removed from the project... The modified version specifically banned 16 organizations, including Microsoft, Palantir, Amazon, Northeastern University, Johns Hopkins University, Dell, Xerox, LinkedIn, and UPS... Although open-source developer Jamie Kyle acknowledged that it's "part of the deal" that anyone "can use open source for evil," he told me he couldn't stand to see the software he helped develop get used by companies contracting with ICE.
Kyle's modification of Lerna's license was originally assented to by other lead developers on the project, but the decision polarized the open-source community. Some applauded his principled stand against ICE's human rights violations, while others condemned his violation of the spirit of open-source software. Eric Raymond, the founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the standard-bearing Open Source Definition, said Kyle's decision violated the fifth clause of the definition, which prohibits discrimination against people or groups. "Lerna has defected from the open-source community and should be shunned by anyone who values the health of that community," Raymond wrote in a blog post on his website.
The core contributor who eventually removed Kyle also apologized for Kyle's licensing change, calling it a "rash decision" (which was also "unenforceable.")
Eric Raymond had called the decision "destructive of one of the deep norms that keeps the open source community functional -- keeping politics separated from our work."
Kyle's modification of Lerna's license was originally assented to by other lead developers on the project, but the decision polarized the open-source community. Some applauded his principled stand against ICE's human rights violations, while others condemned his violation of the spirit of open-source software. Eric Raymond, the founder of the Open Source Initiative and one of the authors of the standard-bearing Open Source Definition, said Kyle's decision violated the fifth clause of the definition, which prohibits discrimination against people or groups. "Lerna has defected from the open-source community and should be shunned by anyone who values the health of that community," Raymond wrote in a blog post on his website.
The core contributor who eventually removed Kyle also apologized for Kyle's licensing change, calling it a "rash decision" (which was also "unenforceable.")
Eric Raymond had called the decision "destructive of one of the deep norms that keeps the open source community functional -- keeping politics separated from our work."
...so you open the software and you make it available to all, but what makes OSS companies money is the support and other services that are value adds. If you say your biggest payers are now cut off, you aren't going to last. Imagine if Walmart decided trailer park dwellers and fat people were no longer allowed to shop there...
Letting yourself get emotionally manipulated by so-called news media is never wise. Their stories are just stories. They aren't about you. Don't be a tool -- don't let the news media control your life, or your actions, or whether you're happy or sad. They haven't earned it. They don't care about you. They won't be there for you when you need help. Your life means nothing to them.
The same guy made a huge drama when Microsoft bought GitHub:
https://twitter.com/jamiebuild...
https://github.com/Microsoft/w...
You're contracting with ICE if you live in the US. They're part of the law enforcement arm of the government and the government is a representation of you (US citizens). Vote or stop paying taxes if you don't want to support ICE, better yet, move out of the US. Us immigrants spent a lot of time and effort to never run afoul of ICE, not sure why some people have such trouble with them.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Computing was available. IBM sold tabulation machines and rented technicians to run them to the SS for use in the concentration camps.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This wasn't a cancer. This was Kyle being thrown under the bus when the other lead devs saw the inevitable shitstorm get kicked up. It does not endear me to the other lead developers.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.
Another reason to keep politics out of software dev. Your bad guy isn't the always other community member's bad guy. If we let everyone exert their grudge on software licenses, no one would be able to use that software.
Yes. If Hitler wanted to use Linux, he should have the freedom to use Linux. It's not our job as software developers to save the world.
Sure, we can't completely remove politics from out work, but the current open source model does an excellent job of drawing the line.
We want freedom in software, and that freedom is extended to everyone, including evil people, unfortunately. That's the politics of open source. Anything else is a slippery slope that will be detrimental to the entire community.
If we deny Nazis from using Linux today, we can deny the Russians from using it tomorrow, then we can deny rich people from using it. And why stop there? Why allow people who think pineapple on pizza is acceptable to use Linux?
Feel free, but then it's no longer FOSS and is effectively removed from the open source community.
Yes, politics should be kept the hell away from work in an open group.
In your example, a significant amount of developers would actually have been on the German side, so they'd be developing away like crazy on their fork (possibly as closed source extensions for their own personal use as a military in some cases), which is allowable anyway.
When in peace time you have an "agenda", and you try and poison open solutions by disallowing groups based on political belief (which is often poorly informed), then you're often just enshrining ignorant bigotry.
Take the ICE case; this is a completely underfunded organisation, trying to do the best it can to juggle a lot of conflicting factors (people trying to game the system, people abusing the system, and genuine people that need to follow particular paths and have them filtered away from the ones trying to game the system), and look after the people as well as it can with the funds. Individuals in it may have unpleasant attributes, but what organisation doesn't? The majority are trying to do a job well.
Denying them access because politics is only going to make matters worse for the end recipients, piss off people in the middle as it could muck about with them doing their job, and they'll see the reduction in care they're able to give, which sure as hell isn't going to endear the open source movement to them..
The options in a movement that explicitly states "this is open, available to everyone" are to either put the work in, knowing that you may disagree with some end uses, but the majority case is that you're benefitting people in general, or you can withhold your work, and not be part of that movement.
Good on ESR; I count this as a sane move. It's a shame the guy was the one thrown under the bus for what seemed to be a general consensus; if they were good at what they did, then a good old rollicking, learn from being stupid (and against the license you were working under), and getting on with the work would have been my preference. And all the senior staff that agreed with it should have been rollicked.
If you're working under the express license that you can't restrict how you want your work to be done, as part of a much larger project, then your choices are either do the work, knowing you'll benefit the groups that you want to help, with edge cases that ones will exist that you don't, or just leave the project. That simple.
If the entire group feel that strongly, they can stop using the license, and build a new product that they can happily play politics with.
Should politics be separated from our work? I'm not convinced it should be. The whole idea of open source / free software is political in nature as it is a means to keep power and control of a users computing with them and not in the hands of any outside entity such as a corporation or government.
I think it's a good idea to keep them separated. The problem with your movement or organization taking a political stance is partisans start fighting back. Just look what's happened to science, AGW has big political implications and the moment it was embraced by "one side" the other side basically became an anti-science political movement. If Open Source gets rebranded as a left wing political philosophy you're going to start seeing legislation targeted at stopping those Libera^H^H^H Open Source people from writing code that controls important infrastructure.
The other big issue is that the Open Source community doesn't necessarily agree on politics outside of the idea of Open Source, and the Open Source community by it's nature tends to take political philosophy a bit more seriously than most. So branding community as a left-wing thing could really split the community. And you don't really want to get into discussions on whether to ban ICE while allowing the Chinese government.
So let's take this to the extreme: If computing and Linux were around in WW2, should we have let Hitler use Linux? What if Hitler's use of Linux was the deciding factor in NAZI Germany winning the war?
Ignoring the question of how you could stop him from using Linux...
Yes. I'm willing to sacrifice many of my principles to fight NAZIs.
I stole this Sig
he problem with your movement or organization taking a political stance is partisans start fighting back. Just look what's happened to science, AGW has big political implications and the moment it was embraced by "one side" the other side basically became an anti-science political movement.
What he said. The right has been saying to the left for a decade or so now "you keep changing the rules, but you're not going to like the new rules". Politicizing everything seems fun until you start realizing the other side can do it to. And, right now in the US, if you're on the left, you might ponder: hmm, the right has all the political power and seems to be on the rise.
Politicizing everything: think about how it will play out.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Eric was not one of the original authors of the Open Source Definition. His memory is imperfect, I doubt deliberately, we're just old. The OSD was created about 9 months before the founding of OSI as the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Eric wasn't a Debian developer. The only change upon forming OSI was the name of the document. Later on, OSD #10 was added (which IMO was not necessary as it's implied by OSD#6).
Also, Eric's call for shunning is a bit over the top. Just get with the values of Open Source and move on, or be very careful to call your non-Open-Source paradigm something other than Open Source.
Nor does it seem necessary to have expelled a developer, if he wished to remain with the project after the removal of an ill-thought-out license term. We can preserve the ethos without being draconian.
Bruce Perens.
And U.S. law, 28 USC 1498, specifically allows contractors for the Federal Government to use intellectual property for government projects whether they are licensed or not. Link discusses 28 USC 1498(a) (patent infringement), but 28 USC 1498(b) covers copyright infringement.
Oh sure, you can file an action in the Federal Court of Claims for "recovery of [your] reasonable and entire compensation as damages for such infringement," but since the licensing cost for the rest of the world is zero... you do the math.
The aspect of the story that doesn't make sense to me is the revocation of the developer's access. If he had gone and made the license change without consulting anyone, that would make sense, but by all accounts the other lead developers agreed to the change. In that case they should all share responsibility for making the change.
Is there something else going on with this guy?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I totally agree with you. Bush Omega and Obama never should has enabled that policy to start with. How about this? When we arrest them we just toss their children into prison with them? But wait! Families need to be kept together so lets just toss granny in there with them. Just like they do in NK or old style USSR? How about that?
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I consider that an attempt to bamboozle people into believing that politics is something to be avoided or an attempt to fool people into believing that one can "keep politics separated from [one's] work". Such a thing is not possible as people hold different views on all sorts of things and work together for different reasons.
Right in line with this is an assertion I've only ever read from advocates of the open source development methodology that some licenses (such as the MIT X11, the 3-clause BSD, and the Apache v2.0 licenses) are "apolitical" whereas the GNU GPLs (v2, v3, and the AGPLs) are "political". And this is typically said in a context which tries to demean use or defense of the relevant GPL. It's no accident that the former set are lax permissive, non-copyleft, or (as free software activist Richard Stallman aptly puts it) "pushover" licenses which all allow proprietary derivatives and these GNU GPLs do not allow proprietary derivatives. It's also no accident that large proprietary firms are fans of the open source development methodology. They stand to benefit when people develop powerful useful software and license it to allow for proprietary derivatives.
A better and more useful observation is that politics are an inescapable part of life, it's better to understand what's really going on and why (typically uncovered by asking 'who benefits?'), and that different political views are not the same as an absence of politics.
Digital Citizen
It's because you're buying into the strawman argument about the D's wanting to have totally open borders. That's not anywhere near the policy Obama had, and not the policy Democrats in office or their voters want. What should be common sense is to treat immigrants and refugees humanely regardless of whether or not they are ultimately allowed entry.
No. It's cancer.
Kyle wasn't thrown under a bus.
He tried to make a major change to the licensing of software that wasn't entirely his own.
He was smacked for it. End of story.
Kyle's still free to fork "My Shitty, Politically Vindictive Learna Offshoot".
He's simply not being allowed to do it for the primary project.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
While you are next driving down our public roads to our parks, consider that all of these things are commons. And they don't do all of those bad things some folks pin on communism.
Bruce Perens.
Communism isn't inherently evil, it's just that it has often come with totalitarianism.
Sorry, Bruce, but you're wrong.
Communism is inherently evil; it can't work without tyranny, because it relies on idealized people who selflessly put the interest of the society above their own. This is not how real people behave. Capitalism relies on people following their impulses (even supposedly negative ones, like greed). It channels those impulses them in directions that benefit others, for example by rewarding people who produce or create new stuff. Communism wants to completely repress those impulses, so it has to force people to behave contrary to their natural inclinations. It has to indoctrinate people to follow the ideology, so freedom of speech and the free flow of ideas are forbidden. Also, communist countries don't reward producers or creators - at best, they should be happy they contributed to the betterment of society. At worst, they are regarded as exploiters, and repressed.
I have first hand knowledge of both systems - I lived more than half my life in an Eastern European country that was theoretically "building a Communist society", and then moved to capitalist America. The difference is huge. And I know some people will come up with the "no true Communism" argument - but those are mostly folks who have never experienced life in a communist country, and can't really understand the realities there.
I believe the best balance is a Canadian or Western-Europe style of capitalism, with strong laws and strong social support. American-style capitalism has become, IMHO, too unregulated and too influenced by money. However, with all its warts, it's miles better than any communist country.