Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@os_sci/117603140140464764
#CASA gets its first institutional critique:
Does open source need a conscience? The CASA manifesto wants to bind software use to moral conditions — a direct break with freedom 0: "run the program for any purpose." But once "good for the community" becomes a license term, whoever interprets it holds the gate.
https://os-sci.com/blog/our-blog-posts-1/does-free-libre-open-source-need-a-conscience-208 @lrhodes
@lrhodes their essay demonstrated to me something i think i've seen mentioned before but never fully clicked for me: for many in the OSS movement the four freedoms are the end of moral reasoning. the CASA movement clashes with the four freedoms, therefore it's bad, QED.
this is especially apparent in this sentence from the conclusion:
> Freedom 0 is not a peripheral feature of FLOSS philosophy — it is the philosophy.
is there a need to examine the four freedoms? no, they're the four freedoms!
@lrhodes Hey,
First off, thanks for citing me in your Manifesto; I'll add a backlink to your piece.
Second, and I know you probably have this in your piece (that I haven't read yet), this part of the Critique:-
where the FSF protects the individual user against the power of developers and corporations
... is just utter bullshit
Apart from Freedom0, none of the other freedoms protect users at all. Freedom to change the software is a privilege for those who can do so, Freedom to redistribute is not a user freedom, Freedom to distribute copies of your modifications, likewise, isn't a user freedom, its a developer freedom.
@lrhodes A good response.
I suspect a few folks feel threatened when there is no reason to be.
But I do find it interesting how some folks seem to react quite badly to folks gently saying we want to exercise our Freedom of Association and don't want to use your tools or help you to develop them.
Their reaction does rather show how their internal thinking works. They see CASA as a means of control. 🤔
When folks are stating their boundaries and their values. That's not controlling.
> Their reaction does rather show how their internal thinking works.
Exactly. It kind of reminded me of that dog-eat-dog, control-or-be controled, scam-or-be-scammed mentality that people like Trump exhibit. They even see genuine gifts as threats because they don't understand the motivation behind them.
@onepict That caught me a little offguard, to be honest.
@lrhodes FLOSS has not felt like a home for many for us for years.
It's well past the time for these organisations to act all affronted when we choose to leave and not sit with them anymore.
It's not a new license and nor are you trying to force folks. Many of us will use OSI approved licences. But CASA principles are fulfilling a need for folks.
So it's interesting that the Organisation feels that having principles is a threat to Open Source.
They want our labour. They can't have it.
Ironically the @os_sci critique is a great source of information, but not in the way they intended.
Your response has helped me further define an adjacent but quite compatible ethos to CASA.
I'm taking 3 ethical imperatives as core community standards and placing the 4 freedoms *inside* those, with a prohibition to conflict (kind of like Asimov's laws of robotics).
https://codeberg.org/H3CC/Ethos
(work in progress)
@lrhodes It's always telling when "you should have morals" draws a critical response.
> But anyone who reads the manifesto alongside the classic texts of the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative quickly sees two world-views colliding. World-views that have formed the backbone of the internet for forty years.
Yes, it's pretty clear that the principles that have governed the internet for 40 years, and have seen it transform from a place of freedom and decentralized experimentation into one of repression, control and centralization *require* a challenge and a change.
The FSF, GNU and OSI are *spectacularly* failing to rise to the challenges of our age.
@lrhodes @os_sci This is all good stuff which I am eager to jump into.
I have wanted to switch a bunch of my software over to an ethical source license for a long time, I just haven't settled on what a good license looks like. I'm not sure anything out there has been truly vetted yet. But that doesn't mean I'm not very interested!
@jaredwhite
I have been thinking about changing my licensing habits for a while, too. Recently, I decided on `AGPL-3.0-only OR PolyForm-Noncommercial-1.0.0` as my new default. Maybe that suits your needs, too?
It's not perfect, but I'm convinced it is the best I could do to
1. be practically unusable by big tech and
2. send a message to fellow indie developers that says "hey, this is for you".
If anything, that license combination is certainly better than `MIT OR Apache-2.0` which dominates the Rust ecosystem.
See https://nerdculture.de/@tynstar/117577159881659364
@lrhodes @os_sci
Here's my response to the @os_sci critique of #CASA
https://destructured.net/casa-conscience-constraint
CASA, conscience and the absence of constraint