Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 18, 2022 22:48 UTC (Fri) by atai (subscriber, #10977)
Parent article: Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Ultimately any "no evil" license is useless against any evil doer, who by definition does not obey rules and laws.

And any license cannot constraint state actors, like Putin (as head of Russia) as by definition sovereign actors are above the laws and license can only be useful under the laws under sovereignty of a country..

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 14:53 UTC (Sat) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

Ultimately any "no evil" license is useless against any evil doer, who by definition does not obey rules and laws.

I wouldn't go quite that far. This assumes that the law itself can never be evil, but there are plenty of examples where the law mandated evil rather than forbidding it, e.g. Jim Crow laws in the United States.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 16:29 UTC (Sat) by elel (guest, #100484) [Link] (3 responses)

Point made, though the point doesn't make much difference; the sentence could be re-written to '...who by definition does not obey rules and laws when it does not suit them'.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 19:16 UTC (Sat) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think that definition works either - even Dungeons & Dragons has a two-axis morality system, with law vs chaos and good vs evil, so you can have a lawful evil character who actively tries to hurt people while meticulously following the rules of their society. (Sometimes because their own sense of morality is based around those rules, or sometimes because they are amoral but fear the punishment for breaking those rules). And real life is more complex than D&D, so it seems far too simplistic to say that evildoers are always happy to break laws.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 20:04 UTC (Sat) by isilmendil (subscriber, #80522) [Link] (1 responses)

"Evildoers are always happy to break laws" is certainly too simplistic. Yet, in their own mind most people are the Good Guys.
To set this into the frame set by your D&D example: chaotic good/evil does not care about the law - lawful good/evil only breaks laws for "the greater good".

Intelligence agencies would probably be a good example of lawful. Whether this is lawful good or lawful evil is very much dependent on various factors and up to debate. Yet those agencies all over the world are happy to bend or outright break the law when it fits them to "stop the bad guys".

Maybe things could be different if there was some accountability for bad faith actors.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 21, 2022 21:32 UTC (Mon) by bjartur (guest, #67801) [Link]

Since when have intelligence agencies been lawful?

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 18:03 UTC (Sat) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link]

Would this be the same "do no evil" Google used to spout?

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 19, 2022 20:40 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Equating legality with morality is a dangerously myopic belief system. We have an article on here from this week alone where an instance of Pocock's behaviour was ruled legal.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 21, 2022 19:23 UTC (Mon) by mat2 (guest, #100235) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is that prudent people often disagree on what is morally permissible and what is not. So a "no evil" clause in a license will appear very vague to the court and it will be difficult to enforce it if at all possible. It will not be known whose definition of evil should be used in edge cases: whether that of the author, of the distributor, of the user, of the judge or of population polls. The author may also change their mind or say so to the court to change their interpretation of "evil" many years after the release date of the software. IANAL, but it is possible that clauses with very imprecise definitions are legally void (I think I have read something like this somewhere).

Vague laws have many drawbacks: their subjects will not know what is forbidden and how they should behave - so they are avoided where possible. Also, vague contracts are a source of problems and frequently invite litigation. So we should avoid vague licenses.

Law is not a good definition of what is morally wrong and what is morally right. It is easy to come up with examples of evil laws and also of bad deeds that are completely legal. Many proprietary computer programs have a license that forbids use of that software to do something illegal. It could have been easy to add such a clause to licenses like GPL, but apparently for some important reasons it was not done.

Some people want to add license clauses to forbid usage of their programs to perform some particular kind of "evil" deed, be it abortion services or perhaps anti-abortion campaigning, etc. The problem is that people will not agree on what "evil" deeds should be forbidden, so everyone will add their own to the list and it will be a mess. For more, see Richard's Stallmans essay:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/programs-must-not-limit-fr...

Evil cannot be legislated away and even more so, successfully eradicated with a software license.

Kuhn: Copyleft Won't Solve All Problems, Just Some of Them

Posted Mar 22, 2022 21:41 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

In Russia at the moment, and in many other jurisdictions, use of Tor is illegal because it circumvents "The Great Internet Firewall of Wherever". But this is exactly where people NEED Tor, partly to be able to separate truth from propaganda (although I'd hesitate to define the difference in *many* situations). Partly for their own personal safety! And probably for plenty of other reasons.

So banning unlawful acts is denying access to free software, to people who really need it.

Cheers,
Wol