2016-08-16 – Nikon D3300
Kanchanaburi War Cemetery, Kanchanaburi, Thailand
last week, Cory Doctorow posted about the semantic separation that has opened up
between free software
and open source software
and why ethical
licenses are (currently) not the best choice – in trying to add ethical clauses,
the definitions leave too many legal loopholes – so, for those of us who can’t
afford high-end legal departments, we’re stuck choosing between the Creepy Uncle
license (free software) or one of the Unpaid Intern licenses (open source
software)
After all, there’s code that we don’t want to make better – at least, not if we care about human freedom. For example: code that helps ICE kidnap our neighbors. Code that powers drones. Code that spies on us, both for governments and for private-sector snoops, like the data-broker industry. Code that helps genocidiers target Gazans. Code that helps defeat adblockers. Code that helps locate new sites for fossil fuel extraction, and code that helps run fossil fuel extraction operations. Human freedom has an inverse relationship to this code: the better this code is, the worse off we all are.—Cory Doctorow, Pluralistic (2025-07-14)
Semantic drift versus ethical drift ↗
the day after
the day before
the month before
the season before