--- "R.A. Hettinga"
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/issue/review_hack.asp?p=0
Hack License By Simson Garfinkel March 2005 [snip]
Stallman wrote in 1985, "the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it." Stallman continues, "Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement." [snip]
Interestingly enough, Stallman expects people to use one of the GNU software licenses when they release a product. Big deal. Ideology and people change. Today the significance of the open source 'movement' being in conflict with the 'vectorialists', or rather the commercial and proprietary software community is that the polarization of the industry is limited to two poles: commercial, for-pay software or free open-source software. Alternatives, or hybrid licensing agreements are generally unknown to the computing public at large. Thus the software industry largely resembles the basic structure of the United States federal political system. Republican, or democrat : open source, or commercial software. Code that I have that is waiting for completion and formal release (some of it has been stolen and distributed in advance of its completion) I intend presently to license under a hybrid license that essentialy grants unrestricted use for non-commercial and non-military purposes, but which requires a license agreement for any commercial use. My thinking was that under the existing arrangement, commercial vendors largely benefited from the efforts of many thousands of open-source developers, thus reducing R&D costs, without necessarily returning anything either to the community, or to the developers themselves. Furthermore, unless one is a high-profile open-source developer it is next to impossible to make a living writing code that is given away to free to all takers. Of this last problem, it may become moot one day if the world economy moves away from the use of money as an intermediate medium of value exchange, but today it is necessary to have money so the developer can pay his rent and buy food and purchase computer hardware tools. Of the former problem, some few vendors have recently exposed their proprietary software to the open source community. Sun Microsystems has recently put their operating system on the table; the NSA released SE Linux, and of course many smaller examples abound. There are other considerations that remain largely unaddressed by the present status quo, however, and I wanted to address some of them. For instance, I wanted to stop my software from being used by a military force in the process of developing proprietary (and presumably classified) weapons of mass destruction or weapons designed to be used against [domestic] civilian populations. Of course, I wouldn't also want my software to be used by terrorists such as the Ted Kaczinski's of the world. As an individual developer, I didn't realistically expect that I would actually halt the unlicensed use of my software for, say, illegal purposes, but I did expect to force such people and organisations to actually have to _steal_ the software rather than handing to them on a sliver platter, with my tacit blessing. While the existing judicial and legislative environment doesn't seem to be friendly to the idea of people taking responsibility for the purposes that their creations are put to, I think that software professionals should put some thought to the moral dimension of the application of their products. The concept of "know your customer" exists today, however badly it is deployed by extant legislation. I believe it may be done well by intelligent people, and surely it can also be abused. A group of Klansmen might release software that contained a licensing agreement restricting its [free] use to aryans. I think Tim might say that they should be free to do so, because "coloured" people as well as concerned caucasions would have the ability and right to produce nominally equivalent software to compete with the Klansman's code. However this view relies on the minimalist view of government regulation, a point of view that is not much in favour today. Whatever the particulars of any given scenario, the point remains that the two-pole system that dominates the software community has some rather large holes. I expect that one day I will be able to afford to replace the computer(s) that were stolen by the local "authorities", despite their ongoing and malicious interference and harassment. Then, I may end up finishing off a few things for release; some of it certainly under the scheme I touch on above, and some perhaps under a 'true' open-source license. Some of said software may even be useful to a non-trivial population of users. At that time, I expect to see how well a hybrid licensing scheme works at this stage of the computer industry's maturation. Until then, however, There isn't much to be said about the flexibility of the existing choices: it's pretty much either all or nothing. Ultimately, I don't think that simple black and white choices will suffice for my purposes. Regards, Steve
Simson Garfinkel is a researcher in the field of computer security. He is the author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century (2000). He is currently a doctoral candidate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
By the way. I am entirely unconcerned if the concensus view of current Cypherpunks subscribers, not to mention Usenet posters, is such that it is believed that replies to my messages -- if any -- need to be tangential and distracting, if not oughtright hostile, for whatever reason. But if the consensus view is that my thoughts and opinions are to be discounted by tacit fiat, I would greatly appreciate it if the people who feel strongly about it would reply in public with a statement to the effect of "fuck off, we don't want your kind around here" or a statement phrased to acheive the requisite degree of accuracy given the feeling of the moment. But until I am "voted off the island", as it were, I do not plan on simply going away merely because of a little unacknowledged and unjustified intellectual apartheid. ______________________________________________________________________ Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca