The software world is one of the most blatant displays of the idea that capitalism is a parasitic structure on top of the general social labour that people do for each other every day.
Yes, this is why FOSS is not as perfectly aligned with socialism as we'd like it to be. Its idea of freedom is generally aligned with American libertarian capitalism, not challenging capitalist power structures or economic systems.
Socialist programmers producing work for socialism should arguably rally around a different licensing strategy and keep things relatively closed, with more explicit permissions required and barring use for various purposes. Example: socialist software products should not be a free resource for the US military.
May I introduce you to this excellent FOSS license? https://anticapitalist.software/
But in all seriousness, you have to be explicit about which kind of free license you speak of. If TikTok takes OBS and doesn't grant the source back to people it distributes its software to, then that's the problem. But if they respect the GPL I don't see what the issue is. Whatever improvements or changes they make are readily available to anyone. This, of course, is not how non-copyleft free licenses work (the raison d'être of the OSI is to promote these sorts of licenses, like the MIT or BSD ones). And companies hate the GPL as is.
IMO GPL of course doesn't go far enough and AGPL is really the best license to balance business interests (businesses would disagree, I have no doubt) and public interest.
I usually push AGPL in my own projects since I need to convince libs, it's a good rec!
I've looked into anti-capitalist licenses and I like them, but I also know that FOSS groups label them as non-free software because of said libertarian capitalist tendencies. I also want there to be a legal entity to go sue people for violations, since a license is only as good as its enforceability.
Unfortunately that legal entity has to sue in bourgeois courts, so it's necessarily disadvantaged.
The people need FOSS but software licenses aren't liberatory vehicles in their own right.
Oh absolutely. And to be clear I'm not trying to sit on my hands or whine about anti-capitalist licenses, just thinking about how we could realize efficacious ones and what we can do before revolution.
Lol I am whining about the anti-cap licenses.
They're well meaning but infinitely more utopian than the various flavors of GPL which are already incredibly utopian.
And yet nobody ever hears about it, since it's in capitalism's best interest that nobody realizes that it runs on the back of human generosity.
As the article points out, most important "FOSS" is funded entirely by corporations these days anyways. Lots of well-maintained software libraries have people working for tech companies who's jobs are to work on that stuff.
The money hose, combined with free or subsidised services, is a control mechanism that lets big tech companies control the OSS ecosystem. Projects they want to promote will get the money spigot.
That's just how things work. The alternative would be to either make libraries all closed-source and have paid licenses (and have far fewer o them), or have software libraries be government funded with grants or whatever (another subsidy to tech companies). Capitalism has companies that provide services, there's no system that would make it not benefit them more than they benefit the software. Most software doesn't even have much of a use outside of services implemented by companies.
I think something else they don't mention is that open source software is also a good way to not pay for people's job training. I see lots of positions that require experience with different frameworks and stuff. It reduces costs and training redundancy that way as much as it's about making companies' products more valuable.
This is fine when the project in question is directly funded by a tech multinational. Less so when the project is something specialised, a little bit niche, or inventive, and therefore not financed by a gigantic corporation.
Smaller companies contribute money as well. But I'm sure they're right that there are lots of companies that use free software libraries without sponsoring them, which is kinda breaking an unspoken rule.
But what can you expect when these FOSSing cucks give it away for free? At least some of them give back I guess.
I'm sure a lot of devs would happily fork and contribute back to open source projects properly if their companies allowed it.
I would. I'm just not allowed. So illegal forks it is.
That tweet doesn't seem like much proof of that. Couldn't they just be using libobs or something? Couldn't this just be installing some dependencies? There's really no explanation for what we're looking at other than that there's a script that maybe installs OBS, inside a plugins directory in their program.
An OBS developer has confirmed it uses OBS code via decompiling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29594492
what would a non-illegal fork look like? Would somebody know, i am curious.
I believe all tik tok has to do is make the code publicly accessible, that is it.
If you take open source, add and make it private, yes.
If it was still open source then no prob
If you do not abide by the usage terms of the open source license, yes, you are actually stealing it. Virtually all open source software licenses state that any resulting project that uses code from that open source project must also be published using the same or a derivative open source license and thus have 100% open source code, and many open source software licenses also state that you cannot make a profit from any project that uses any code from the original open source project.
Software licenses are a fuck, but under capitalism where arbitrary rules are king, they're expected to be honored. Haven't read the details here but the GPL license pretty much says "if you're using this it needs to also be GPL licenses so it stays FOSS" so that's a big one. There's some issues though, normally that more permissive licensed software won't pull in GPL stuff.
There was a lot of drama last spring around an XML file that one Ruby library used originally coming from the freedesktop dot org group (which uses GPL). Someone from freedesktop realized, lightly threatened the maintainer with a lawsuit, and the maintainer yanked all the versions that were MIT licensed (more permissive than GPL). This library was a dependency of the Rails framework, which is far and away the most popular usage of Ruby (also MIT licensed) and basically broke all fresh installs or builds of Rails projects for a day or so. The net result is that the original library got removed from the Rails project.
I've written about this a couple times on here but big-picture, anything with restrictive licenses will have a really hard time gaining traction in tech, at least right now
Edit: Heres a link to more details about the Ruby issue I mentioned above, and more discussion about license from when all that went down
