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More than a quarter-century ago, a group of hackers decided that, as a label, "free software" was a liability, and they set out to replace it with a different label, "open source," on the basis that "open source" was easier to understand and using it instead of "free software" would speed up adoption.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
They were right. The switch from calling it "free software" to calling it "open source" sparked a massive, unbroken wave of adoption, to the point where today it's hard to find anyone who professes animus to "open source," not even Microsoft (who once called it "a cancer").
Two motives animated "open source" partisans: first, they didn't like the ambiguity of "free software." Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined "free software") viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug.
He liked that "free" had a double meaning: "free as in speech" (an ethical proposition) and "free as in beer" (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of "free software" as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing "free software," would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn't be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom.
For "open source" partisans, this was a bug, not a feature. They wanted to enlist other hackers to develop freely licensed codes, and convince their bosses to adopt this code for internal and public-facing use. For the "open source" advocates, a term designed to confuse was a liability, a way to turn off potential collaborators ("if you're explaining, you're losing").
But the "open source" side wasn't solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren't excited about building a "commons" or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents.
For these "open source" advocates, the advantage of free software methodologies - publishing code for peer review and third-party improvement - was purely instrumental: it produced better code. Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method.
Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it's only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.
This is true! Publishing code makes it better, and prohibitions on code publication make code worse. That's the lesson of the ransomware epidemics of the past decade: these started with a series of leaks from the NSA and CIA.
Both agencies have an official policy of researching widely used software in hopes of finding exploitable bugs and then keeping those bugs secret, so that they will be preserved in the wild and can be exploited when the agencies wish to attack their enemies.
The name for this practice is NOBUS, which stands for "No One But US": we alone are smart enough to find these bugs, so if we discover them and keep them secret, no one else will find them and use them to attack our own people. This is a provably false proposition, and a very dangerous one.
The Vault 7, Vault 8, and NSA cyberweapon leaks blew a hole in NOBUS.
Failures in the agencies' own security protocols resulted in the release of a long list of defects (mostly in versions of Windows, but other OSes and programs were affected). Malicious software authors used these as can openers to pry open millions of computers, enlisting them into botnets and/or shutting them down with ransomware.
These leaks also provided some "ground truth" for researchers who study malicious software.
Once these researchers had a list of which defects the spy agencies had discovered and when, they were able to compare that list of defects that malicious software authors had discovered and exploited in the wild, and estimate the likelihood that a spy agency defect would be independently discovered and abused by the agency's enemies, who they were supposed to be protecting us from. It turns out that the rediscovery rate for spy agency bugs is about 20% per year.
In other words, there's a one in five chance that a bug that the CIA or NSA is hoarding will be used to attack America and Americans within the year.
NOBUS is a form of software alchemy. Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis.
But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemist kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were *very* wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison.
Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review. Both open source and free software partisans claim transparency as a key virtue of their system, because transparency leads to improvement ("with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
At the outset, "open source" and "free software" were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa. But over the ensuing decades, that changed, as Benjamin "Mako" Hill explained in his 2018 Libreplanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon":
Several months ago, I gave the closing keynote address at LibrePlanet 2018. The talk was about the thing that scares me most about the future of free culture, free software, and peer production. A …
As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between "open" better code) and "free" code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: "Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?"
If you were an "open source" person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, "Does this new thing increase code-quality?" If you were a "free software" person, the question you had to answer was, "Does this make people more free?"
These value judgments carried enormous weight. They influenced whether hackers would work to improve a given package or pursue a use-case; they determined who would speak or exhibit at conferences, they created (or deflated) "buzz," and they influenced the direction that new license versionss would take, and whether those licenses would be permissible on influential software distribution channels.
For a movement that runs on goodwill as much as on dollars, the social acceptability of a practice, a license, a technology or a person, mattered.
Hill describes how chasing openness without regard to its consequences for freedom created a strange situation, one in which giant tech monopolists have software freedom, while the rest of us have to make do with open source.
All the software that powers the cloud systems of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, is freely licensed. You can download it from Github. You can inspect it to your heart's content. You can even do volunteer work to improve it.
But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it.
And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high.
In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it.
Which is not to say that free software doesn't benefit from open source's popularity.
The vast cohort of people who have been won over by open source's instrumental claims to superior code are the top of a funnel that free software partisans can operate to convince these people to consider the ways that their lives have been made more free through open code, and to prioritize freedom, even ahead of code quality.
The free/open source movement is actually a coalition of people who share *some* goals even if they differ on others.
But coalitions are also brittle, because after they get what they want (transparency for code), then they have to resolve their differences, which means that some members of the coalition are going to be bitterly disappointed.
After all, there's code that we don't want to improve - at least, not if we care about 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.
Periodically, some free software advocate will follow this to its logical conclusion and propose a new free software license that prohibits use for some purpose: "you may not use my code in the military," or "you may not use my code for ad-tech," or "you may not use my code in ways that despoil the environment."
It's not surprising that this is a recurring event. After all, if you care about software as a tool for enhancing human freedom, and you notice that your code is being used to make people less free, it's natural to want to do something about it.
And yet, every one of these efforts have foundered - and I think every one will. This isn't because ethics clauses in license are a foolish idea, but because they are logistically transcendentally hard to get right.
First, there is the problem of writing good "legal code." Free software licenses are extraordinarily hard to get right. Not only do the terms have to spell out the rights and obligations of participants in the software project, but the whole system needs to be designed so that these clauses can be enforced. The right to sue for breaching a license is determined by "standing" - only people who have been injured by a license violation have the right to seek justice in court.
Even if you figure out all that stuff, it's possible for even extremely talented lawyers working in collaboration with the most ethical of technologists to make subtle errors that take years or decades to surface.
By that time, there might be millions or even *billions* of works that have been released under the defective version of the license, and no practical way to contact the creators of all those works to get them to relicense under a patched version of the license.
This isn't a hypothetical risk: for more than a decade, every version of every flavor of Creative Commons license had a tiny (but hugely consequential) defect.
These licenses specified that they "terminated immediately upon any breach." That meant that if you made even the tiniest of errors in following the license terms, you were instantly stripped of the protections of the CC license and could be sued for copyright infringement. Many *billions* of works were released under these older CC licenses.
Today, a new kind of predator called a "copyleft troll" exploits this bug in order to blackmail innocent Creative Commons users.
Multimillion dollar robolawyer firms like Pixsy represent copyleft trolls who release timely images under ancient CC licenses in the hopes that bloggers, social media users, small businesses and nonprofits will use them and make a tiny error in the way they attribute the image. Then Pixsy helps the troll extort hundreds or thousands of dollars from each victim, under threat of a statutory damages claim of $150,000 per infringement:
Creative Commons spent millions over years, working with a who's-who of international copyright and licensing experts, and it took them more than a decade to fix this bug, and the billions of works released under the old licenses are ticking time-bombs. After all, the copyright in those works will last for 70 years after their authors die, which means that anyone who acquires the copyright to those older images could turn troll and go hunting.
There's a reason that old FLOSS hands react with instant derision whenever someone proposes making up a new software license. It's the same reason cryptographers are so hostile to the idea of people rolling their own cipehers: no matter how smart and well-intentioned you are, there's a high likelihood that you will screw up and irrevocably place innocent people at risk.
Yes, irrevocably: getting all those creators to relicense their works under a modern CC license is effectively impossible. Even projects with a relatively small number of contributors - like Mozilla - had to resort to throwing away chunks of code whose authors couldn't be located and paying someone to rewrite them under a new license.
Those are reasons not to come up with new free and/or open licenses, period.
But on top of that, there's a special set of confounders that arise when ethics clauses are added to free/open licenses.
The first of these is the definitional problem. Even seemingly simple categories can elude consensus on definition. Again, the Creative Commons licenses are instructive here: from the outset, CC licenses let creators toggle an ethics clause, called the "NonCommercial" (NC) flag. Works licensed under "NC" couldn't be used commercially. Seems simple, right?
Wrong. For years - to this day - CC users have been unable to consistently agree on what constitutes a "commercial use." If you post something in your personal capacity to a commercial service, is that "commercial?" Well, it had better not be, because *anything* you find online is going to have some kind of commercial enterprise involved in getting that file to you: a long-haul fiber provider, a data-center, a hosting company, a cloud company, a social media service, etc, etc.
If "noncommercial" means "no one can make any money as a result of the distribution of this work," then an NC license would mean that works couldn't be distributed at all (even if you're just printing off copies of a cool image at home and stapling them to telephone poles, the printer ink company and the staple company are making money off of every copy you post).
Now, the CC NC ethics clause is the *best case* for an ethics clause in a license. CC is a centralized organization that has total authority over the text of CC licenses and exercises near-total control over their interpretation.
Now imagine how a hypothetical ethics clause in a software license would perform, given the CC NC experience. Compared with, say, "military/nonmilitary," the "commercial/noncommercial" distinction is trivial to draw.
Is Ford - whose cars are in DoD motor-pools - a "military" user? What if Ford decides to boycott the Pentagon, but the Navy still buys a bunch of used Ford Focuses from a wrecking yard and fixes them up with Ford parts they buy at an Autozone: does Ford now become a "military" user of free/open software?
This is why the right wing troll mantra "What is a woman?" is so effective: women aren't *what*s; they are *who*s, and if you try to come up with a definition that encompasses all the people who are women, it will stretch to dozen of pages and still miss people out. This isn't unique to women - almost every category defies exhaustive definition. Famously, there is no such thing as a fish:
But imagine now that we are going to create billions of works whose copyright will endure for more than a century, and if any of them fails to refer to someone by their name correctly, then any of millions of people, some of them not even born yet, could ruin some software contributor's life and maybe the lives of thousand or millions of users of their software.
And "name" - like "noncommercial" - is an easy case. The hard cases are things like "military/nonmilitary," "fossil fuel-sector/non-fossil fuel sector" etc etc. Big, distributed projects with informal institutions and leaders are poorly suited to adjudicating *any* of these definitional questions, but toothy ethics clauses require these loose ad-hocracies to create and enforce definitions of the most pernicious and slippery concepts of all.
I want to be clear that I'm not opposed to the idea of an ethics clause in free/open licenses. I make extensive use of both the NC and commercial CC licenses, after all. My objections are practical, not philosophical.
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Rochdale in Greater Manchester to give the opening keynote at the 2025 Coop Congress.
After my talk, I was on a panel with Chris Croome, who has been campaigning for a co-op software license:
> either enforce co-operation and sharing and do not allow code to be privatised (made proprietary) or code that is released under terms that dictate that if the code is used to run a business the nature of the business must be a co-operative.
I’m personally not in favour of dual licensing. Projects that use a AGPL license without a CLA or dual licensing and which pay their developers includes Nextcloud — it is possible.
I've been thinking about this ever since and I think all my concerns about other ethics clauses apply here. Admittedly, there is a widely accepted and mature definition of "co-op," the seven "Rochdale Principles":
But there are plenty of entities that are recognizable as "co-ops" that exist outside of the UK, the Anglosphere and the global north that don't embrace all of these principles, or embrace them in ways that fit into the consensus as to their meaning that has emerged among Rochdale-derived co-ops. It's not merely that a "co-op" license might exclude these co-ops.
It's also that the enforcement mechanism for software licenses is that individual software authors retain the copyright to their lines of code, and use copyright law to threaten and punish people who violate the license terms.
This means that you could have a pool of potentially thousands of software authors, *and* their literary estates, who would have the right - for more than a century - to attack co-ops that use "co-operatively licensed" software on the grounds that the differ in their interpretation of what is - and is not - a co-op.
What's more, there are plenty of groups that could organize as a co-op and satisfy the software license's definition, who might nevertheless not be "ethical" by the lights of the co-op movement. Think of a firm of mercenaries that set up as a worker co-op (if this strikes you as implausible, I remind you that the most vicious, human-rights-abusing cops in the world are mostly members of "unions").
i. Excluding co-operators because of small differences in which co-op principles they adopt;
ii. Including co-operators who are structured as compliant co-ops, but do terrible things; and
iii. Putting license users at the risk of copyleft trolls who exploit ambiguity in the definition of "co-op" to extort massive "settlement fees" from software users.
That all said, a co-op license has positive aspects as well. Remember what happened when we stopped stressing "freedom" in our software licenses: we got the code quality of "open," applied to all kinds of code, including code that destroys freedom. I've been involved with co-ops since I was a pre-teen, and I've experienced firsthand what happens when a co-op forgets its ethical basis in favor of instrumental goals.
Take the Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Canada's most beloved and successful consumer co-op. MEC was inspired by the US outdoor gear co-op REI, and it served Canadians proudly for decades. But like most consumer co-ops, MEC had very low member involvement, so a cabal of MBA-poisoned looters to were able to take over MEC's board, change the bylaws, and then flip the co-op to a ruthless American private equity fund:
MEC isn't a co-op anymore. The board's argument was that keeping MEC a co-op wasn't as important as infusing it with capital so it could source the goods its members wanted and offer them at reasonable prices. Joke's on them: after five years of PE looting, MEC's quality sucks and its prices are sky-high.
Institutional structure (like whether you are a co-op or not) can *influence* the kind of activity an organization engages in, but it can't *control* it. Keeping enshittification at bay requires multiple, overlapping constraints that prevent the institution from caving into the worst instincts of its worst members.
That's why I'm rooting for Bluesky to get more federated. It's nice that they're a B-corp, but that alone won't stop a dedicated investor class from replacing the current management with enshittifiers who destroy the lives of tens of millions of Bluesky users. However, if a large plurality of Bluesky users weren't actually *on* Bluesky, but on federated servers, they could credibly threaten Bluesky's business by defederating with it if it enshittified:
So maybe the prospect of losing access to all of its business-critical software could have acted as a check on MEC's board and prevented them from sleazing up to private equity vampires. This is certainly a possible benefit to a co-op ethics clause in a software license. I'm not convinced that it outweighs the risks, though.
I'm a free software person. There are bitter free software partisans who think that the open source people stole our revolution. I understand their outrage. But I also think we left an open goal. In retrospect, choosing a deliberately confusing name in the hopes of sparking conversations was a tactical error. The cohort of potential movement supporters who also enjoy word-games is smaller than the cohort who are put off by being deliberately confused.
I also don't think it's a problem that the software freedom coalition includes people who value software freedom for purely instrumental reasons - because open code is better code. I *do* think it's a problem that they are the senior partners in the coalition and have steered it for a quarter-century. After all, they steered it into this ditch where tech monopolists have free software and we all make do with open source.
Coalitions, though, are hugely important. Take the as-yet-nameless coalition lined up against corporate power, which has defied political science's laws of gravity, pushing antitrust enforcement across the world, against the world's largest and most powerful corporations:
This coalition needs a name. I often cite James Boyle's explanation of the role the word "ecology" played in bringing together thousands of disparate issues (spotted owls, ozone depletion) under a single banner and turning them into a *movement*. The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner.
Almost all of our definitional terms are "anti-something," from "antitrust" to "antifascist." We have no end of words to describe what we stand against (even "enshittification"'s opposite is "disenshittification"), but we still lack a word to express what we're *for*.
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Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently RADICALIZED and WALKAWAY, science fiction for adults; HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly …
@pluralistic > The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner
Back in the 90s we organised under the banner of a loose international coalition called People's Global Action. Which corporate media reframed as "anti-globalisation movement". Many people called it the "alter-globalisation movement", or later, the global justice movement.
All of the "freedom" labels have been co-opted by the (ptui) Libertarians.
The words I think of that aren't "anti-X" are "civil defense" or "integrity" kinds of ideas.
"Civil Integrity Movement" maybe: it combines the definitions of integrity, in the sense of having a good moral sense, and of keeping things whole and unbroken.
oh but they have come up with a name: “woke”. Coined by the ghouls that stand to benefit from labeling anyone who stands against their humanity destroying tendencies, as a dismissive insult.
I'm also a Free Software person, but I parted ways with the FSF a long time ago because they fundamentally misunderstand how social movements work. Successful laws and contracts are not there to enforce behaviour, they are there to codify the consensus on acceptable behaviour.
I have never murdered anyone. This isn't because laws provide consequences if I do, it's because I think living in a society where everyone lives in fear of being randomly killed is bad and so I subscribe to the consensus that we all agree not to murder each other. Laws against murder exist because there are always a few outliers and you need a rule to deal with them. Similarly, contracts work best when there is broad agreement between both parties about what they are both going to do. The contract assumes both are acting in good faith and then does two things:
Provide some clear text describing what both parties intend to reduce confusion, and
Provide some fallback in case one is not acting in good faith.
The problem with FSF licenses and their derivatives is that they don't start by building that consensus, they start by assuming bad faith. At that point, you're immediately shifting to an adversarial stance.
When you present people with laws that they consider unjust or contracts that they don't feel reflect social agreements, you end up with people trying to find loopholes. Sometimes they just ignore the laws / contracts entirely and you end up with widespread civil disobedience or mass contract violation. Now you have selective enforcement problems.
The people who are most able to find valid loopholes are the ones who are able to employ the most lawyers. The simple act of writing a complex license shifts power from individuals to corporations.
The biggest failure of the Free Software movement has been to fail to show any benefits for most users of the Four Freedoms, except the zeroth. The linguistic problem of Free Software and freeware being conflated is strengthened by the fact that, for 99% of users, the sole benefits that they directly perceive from Free Software are the same as those in freeware.
There needs to be a variation of Conway's Law that talks about the relationship between the structure of a piece of code and the underlying business and economic systems behind it. Proprietary software systems naturally become closed all-encompassing ecosystems because the goal for such a system is to make sure that users spend more time in it. Interoperability that lets people take their data and leave is a down side. Third-party plugins are useful because they let other people build things that require end users to pay you, but plugins that could grow enough functionality to eventually remove you as a dependency are a danger. The most desirable end state for proprietary software looks like iOS and the Apple App Store: the vendor controls a critical component that everything depends on and also the distribution channel for everything that extends this base layer.
Free Software systems that aim to reproduce this structure of self-contained siloed apps are doomed to failure. They are playing the proprietary software game, with none of the advantages that proprietary software vendors enjoy in such a world.
If you really want to build a Free Software system, you need to build simple, understandable, composable systems that individual end users can easily extend and tailor to their needs. The distinction between a document, a plugin, and an app are meaningless in such a system: users have full access to all of the functionality of the underlying system and can trivially extend it and share their extensions with others. Licenses like the GPL are a liability in such a system because they impose complex legal requirements on things that should be normal uses of the system. Treating extending and modifying a program as unusual things that most end users won't need to do and therefore where it's okay to introduce legal friction is implicitly starting from the assumption that you will fail to build a system where most users benefit at all from freedoms one to three.
"We are not from the century of making words up. Words were already invented. We are from the century of reinventing the words that were already invented." (Almada Negreiros, 1921; translation from the original Portuguese by me)
We had exactly this dilemma in a company I worked for which had a ‘no defence work’ rule. We were asked to provide equipment for on-base schools. We decided that was OK, but not everyone was comfortable with the decision.
the SCP Wiki for the last number of years has wanted to update our license from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-SA 4.0 to give the writers & artists more freedom over their work
presently, in order for the site to move to 4, under 3 we have to reach out to every author & the site turned 17 years yesterday
like what you wrote about firefox, we'd have to do the same (it's a possibility when the site jumps from wikidot to it's own wiki-platform, & from 3.0 to 4.0)
I understand there to have been efforts to try to do this sort of thing both in indie TTRPG licenses and the rules of said indie games themselves ("Nazis are not allowed to play this game") with even less success, especially since the OGL debacle resulted in the shattering of the license consensus. (CC-BY didn't catch on in any broader way among TTRPG studios, and just replaced the OGL for newer projects with original 5e D&D as the only prior reference.)
@martinvermeer @jorgecandeias Language has always been a battleground of essentially contested concepts. I don't think that's a reason to avoid labels, even in a world eager to mislabel you.
Anyway, I think this movement is a huge tent of other existing ones. People working to expand democracy/dignity across economic, social, and political dimensions. Not sure one term is desirable for this, but maybe we should recognize we're addressing the same problem from different angles.
This coalition seems based on human rights. The very phrase is racist (to Klingons, per Star Trek VI).
If something is Pro-Human, it's necessarily unified against non-human AI and corporate entities, enforcing a simple hierarchy when they're in conflict.
It could start by solidifying the sanctity of human lives: their right to privacy, their right to identity and expression, and their right to humane labor.
I don’t understand. Can you please explain. I like FireWire and use it, but it is going away and I don’t like it. I have to get a new laptop, and am sad I can’t find one with FireWire.
Over the last 39 months, a data broker harvested 1 billion flight records from commercial airline customers, and sold it to border guards and ICE. eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/data…
I guess we just sit here, repeat ourselves and wait for people to understand that a system that allows profiteering off of harm, lack of privacy and inequality is beyond fixing.
I love refrigerators, oh wait, no, that’s boring, sorry not sorry, I meant Nvidia because nothing says “cool” like a graphics card that heats your room and crashes with style.
If you're looking for a cohesive definition for the word "terrorism" you will find only one: actions that go against the hegemony of the US government.
The adage that 'terrorism is attacking civilians for political gains' is of course an incoherent definition, as the US and its allies may do this ad nauseam and it's "defense"
Yet certain forms of speech do comprise "terrorism" now, if they fit the above criteria.
I like #CLI and #TUI tools. I use them everyday to read my emails, edit code, manage my agenda and todo list, access some websites and gemini capsules, even chat with my local LLM...
I miss these tools when I use my phone. I sometimes use ConnectBot to access them on one of my machines via ssh, but the phone keyboard and the screen size don't give me the same satisfaction.
Have you tried to use an external #keyboard with your Android phone to play with CLI/TUI software? Is it a solution? Which keyboard?
I recently discovered helix editor and have been enjoying that. (And already miss a lot of its keyboard navigation when I’m back in other editors.)
And I started using jj-vcs as a better git client.
When I write scripts for myself these days, I use Deno because you can easily include dependencies in a single file. I recommend jsr.io/@david/dax for easy shell scripting and prompting.
my last Android phone, and last phone with a physical keyboard, was the G1 developer phone. I’d flip out the keyboard and ssh into my IRC client on the way to/from work. But latency was awful for anything interactive like text editing.
I've tried many small or foldable bluetooth keyboard, but I never managed to actively used them, because a/ their layout is too small for my fingers/hands and I do too many mistakes and b/ the phone screen is not big enough to put the phone away and type without tiring my eyes. I wish I could though.
That's why I'm trying things like portable cyberdeck that are more usable than a phone, hopefully that will demote my phone to just being a phone and these cyberdeck being more portable micro computers
@audricd yes, i have, i find the experience severely degraded. It makes typing messages significantly faster, but thanks to the odd key spacing my muscle memory doesn't work as expected.
what would be your setup? Sitting at a desk, or holding the device in your hand?
For the latter, something like the frogpad (unfortunately not on sale anymore) seems good: a keyboard you wear on your wrist and use with one hand, while the other hand holds the phone.
Otherwise, a keyboard with less keys but keys of standard size could bo a good compromise (similar to a laptop keyboard, no keypad, maybe slightly different layout)
Well I guess Scott Adams didn’t learn as much from Covid as we thought Here he is trying to justify the rug pull on the Epstein story nitter.poast.org/ScottAdamsSay…
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“We know the tank is us and…we’re the ones defending ourselves” A dystopian – and mandatory – Israeli training video for high school students about to travel abr…
"Transhumanism is second nature to us mastodon users, so it's easy to forget that the average person probably only knows about dollposting and one or two dragon therians." "And a bunch of furries, of course." "Of course."
If there is a feature of a language that is sometimes problematic, and if it can be replaced with another feature that is more reliable, then always use the more reliable feature.
Israeli sniper Dani Adega, who boasted of 4 kills during a ceasefire, has been located in #Lisbon. The #HindRajabFoundation has filed a legal complaint in #Portugal demanding his immediate arrest.
Lisbon / Brussels – 14 July 2025 The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed a formal legal complaint in Portugal against Israeli sniper Dani Adonya Adega for his role in the Israeli genocidal...
“How can you be an #artist and not reflect the times?”
"This text has been written collectively, anonymously, and with a hint of fear. It reflects on and denounces the current situation at the #Berlin University of the Arts (UdK Berlin), one of the many cases of repression and criminalization that have taken place after October 7, 2023, against those in #Germany expressing their solidarity with #Palestine. […] Fear is a methodology of fascism“ by the Counter-Narrative Group
Germany’s Holocaust memorial institute has labeled several well-known pro-Palestinian symbols and slogans as “anti-Semitic”.
In a new 57-page guide published by Germany’s Buchenwald Memorial Centre on July 7, and titled “Problematic brands, codes, symbols and signs of right-wing extremist and anti-Semitic groups”, the second section treats pro-Palestine symbols as equally dangerous as neo-Nazi and far-right symbols.
Berlin (Quds News Network)- Germany’s Holocaust memorial institute has labeled several well-known pro-Palestinian symbols and slogans as “anti-Semitic” and “potentially anti-Zionist or anti-Israel.” I
And who are these People to say anything? Are they lawyers? Are they in government? Can they regulate this things just like that? And most important #FreePalestine
@disisdeguey Normally, a guide that does not correspond to the truth would be ignored. German politicians will take this report seriously if Israel asks them to.
Because of this blind devotion to Israel, Germany (thanks to Nicaragua) is on trial at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague for its arms exports and other support for Israel. The case is expected to go on for years and Germany will still have to defend itself before the court.
Open Letter: Suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement! To: High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas CC: President of…
ΑΛΗΤΕΣ ΓΚΩΜΟΥΝΗΑ Η ΔΕΞΙΑ ΚΥΒΕΡΝΗΣΗ ΘΑ ΒΑΛΕΙ ΤΟ ΜΑΧΑΙΡΙ ΣΤΟ ΚΟΚΚΑΛΟ . Θα ελέγξει τον ΟΠΕΚΕΠΕ για υποθέσεις από το 1998 και θα πάρει σκούπα να φωτίσει το δίκαιο και το τίμιο . Όλοι οι κυρπαντεληδες θα μείνουν ικανοποιημένοι με εντολή ΚΥΡΙΑΚΟΥ και ας συστάθηκε το 2001 ο ΟΠΕΚΕΠΕΣ . ΦΑΤΕ ΣΑΝΟ ΚΕΡΝΑΕΙ ΤΟ ΚΡΑΤΟΣ
„[A]lt-Bischof Hans-Jürgen Abromeit (...) wirft der EKD vor, Israels Menschenrechtsverletzungen zu verschweigen, sich an realitätsferner Zwei-Staaten-Rhetorik festzuklammern und die christlichen Palästinenser im Stich zu lassen. Was er stattdessen fordert: klare Worte, historische Verantwortung – und den Mut zur unbequemen Wahrheit.”
2019 sorgte Alt-Bischof Abromeit mit Kritik an Deutschlands "Überidentifikation mit Israel" für einen Eklat. Jetzt wirft er der EKD vor, Unrecht zu verschweigen und palästinensische Christen im Stich zu lassen – und fordert klare Worte.
The number of scam centers in eastern Myanmar is expanding at a rapid pace. Even after a large-scale crackdown in February, construction has continued -- underscoring that criminal hubs have not been eradicated.
Typen wie der gerichtsurteilsverachtende Wiederholungstäter da rechts im Bild wollen doch immer ALLE ABSCHIEBEN, die sich NICHT AN RECHT & GESETZ halten.
Dann könnte man ja jetzt auf der Basis mal Dobrindt, Spahn & die rechtsextremen AfDler auf eine einsame Insel verfrachten und dafür die im Schlafanzug aus ihrem anständigen Leben wegdeportierte afghanische Kitabetreuerin zurückholen, oder?
EC ‘Coordinator for combating antisemitism’ says selling cakes to raise funds for Gaza is antisemitic because they might make Israel supporters feel ‘unsafe’ Katharina von S…
hdg (human domesticion guide, petplay kink), me not being normal about the war of the worlds
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after only knowing the musical adaptation for the longest time, the actual War of the Worlds novel had me rolling over laughing with how the Artilleryman not only describes how he's gonna Start All Over Again underground (as in the musical adaptation) but also spends a little bit outlining methods in which the Martians could domesticate humans and why it would work. including "pets of some of them" and "eroticism".
“We know the tank is us and…we’re the ones defending ourselves” A dystopian – and mandatory – Israeli training video for high school students about to travel abr…
Die EU-Antisemitismus-Koordinatorin lobbyierte laut geleaktem Bericht mit Lügen gegen Israel-Sanktionen. Kriegsverbrechen in Gaza seien "Gerüchte über Juden", Spendenaktionen für Gaza "ambienter Antisemitismus". EU-Botschafter widersprachen ihr deutlich: euobserver.com/eu-and-the-worl…
The high-level EU official was lobbying against Israel sanctions using bogus claims on antisemitism, according to a "sensitive" cable from Tel Aviv leaked to EUobserver.
Ever more surreal, ever more oppressive. Elderly people in Cardiff holding cardboard signs supporting Palestine Action get their doors stoved in, homes raided and food apparently tested for radioactive materials. Cardboard: the new weapon of mass destruction. 🧵docs.google.com/document/d/1...
For immediate release, 14 July 2025 POLICE DIVIDED OVER PALESTINE ACTION PROTESTS Cardiff, 12 July, extended detention and raids Derry, 12 July, no arrests The spectrum of responses on Saturday ranged from a hands-off approach in Kendal and Derr…
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down.
urllib3 doesn’t offer monetary rewards but we still get AI slop and 10x more reports than before. Of course it’s much less than curl but one report per month is still a lot for our small volunteer team. Thankfully so far the slop itself was easy to decline.
I took a look at some of those links at the end of the post and wow! I don't think I could imagine a more cruel hell. I envy your patience and politeness.
Not fully formed thought from the sideline. Perhaps it is possible to incur some kind of cost that is not monetary on the submitter, "You must have a reputation over X on Hackerone" or "You have to have something accepted into a 'well known' project". Not sure how to implement and it would probably involve some change from Hackerone also.
reading the linked "vulnerability reports" is a mix of visceral amusement at seeing these people raked over the coals, and abject horror that so many engineer hours were wasted each time on getting there. At some point OSS engineers are going to succumb to burnout from being constantly drained and derailed by all the "time saving help" of LLM confabulations. Then we all are worse off, including the corporations selling the lie that their LLMs are superior to the wisdom of an experienced engineer. This garbage is actively harming the vast software ecosystem that we _all_ rely on. The short-sightedness of the people using it is unnerving. I honestly thought we as an industry were more strategic, pragmatic, and empirical than this. Nope.
i really don't envy you, and how to solve, i can only think of a few things that come to mind when i see, hear and read the coverage.
make the submission process as long and opaque as possible, so that you aren't giving signals to what works to get through review and what doesn't.
add delays into the submission process, while real bugs do need to be solved asap, making someone wait 24 hours to complete their submission may help.
there may also be ways to deterministically (i.e. not ai) analyse text, like using TF-IDF and KMeans to compare and cluster reports. if a whole lot of reports have similar wording, they could be triaged down the list.
Maybe a crazy suggestion, but suppose it cost say $5 to submit a bug report eligible for the reward (but free if you don’t want to be eligible)? People who are confident their report is accurate won’t mind. People who are just AI spamming will think twice (or you get their money!) If the prospect of a reward is driving the report submissions, that should slow down the slop. If something else is going on, that will become clear.
No surprise that the Beeb give undue coverage to Farrage. It's been going on since before Brexit; Auntie had a huge part to play in enabling our split from the EU.
I have previously blogged about the relatively new trend of AI slop in vulnerability reports submitted to curl and how it hurts and exhausts us. This trend does not seem to slow down.
"Every single patient I see is in a state of starvation," said a doctor on today's Democracy Now, on #Gaza.
Anyone who works for the #NewYorkTimes should have a deep & indelible sense of shame for working for a publication that enables genocide and completely fails to speak truth to power.
It is fully possible to interview people in Gaza and interrogate Israeli lies, but #NYT intentionally does not.
Remember that #NYT ran "Screams Without Words" fabricating a narrative that the Oct 7 Hamas attack included systematic sexual assaults, even though the journalist struggled to find a *second* source on the claim.
Labour politicians failed to declare a foreign trip funded by a pro-Israel lobbying group.
Five MPs, alongside Labour peer Luciana Berger, were taken on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel and Palestine in May by the lobbying group Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) where they posed for a photo with Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who has backed the genocide of Palestinians.
Two of the MPs who took part have registered the trip.
To celebrate our 20th anniversary of AGT, we’re giving you early access to a Golden Buzzer performance.America’s Got Talent premieres Tuesday, May 27 at 8/7c...
Usher's official music video for 'More' (RedOne Jimmy Joker Remix). Click to listen to Usher on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/UsherSpotify?IQid=UsherMoreAs fea...
Alan MacLeod looks at how the Swedish climate activist widened her focus to the capitalist system and Israeli genocide in Gaza and lost the attention of the corporate press.
Majorities in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain would support the UK rejoining. As things stand, if Britons overstay the 90-day visa-free limit, you may be banned from entering Schengen countries for up to 3 years.
Jeff Epstein was a touchstone for MAGA to articulate anger at concentrated power. It also powered a business model for the podcasteratti. Trum threatened all of that. Plus, the merger spree starts.
Jeff Epstein was a touchstone for MAGA to articulate anger at concentrated power. It also powered a business model for the podcasteratti. Trum threatened all of that. Plus, the merger spree starts.
Yah and Strange Fruit is about the gold standard? These guys work so hard to pretend... I found a discussion that's not oversimplified to support the "Actually," crowd. billofrightsinstitute.org/essa…
Look at this bloated bag of ugly nazi shit...bet that no-balls slime mold of hate (sorry slime molds) doesn't have the guts to spend 25 weeks in Alligator Auschwitz. No guts.
Trump administration border czar Tom Homan didn't hold back when faced with a heckler during a conservative conference over the weekend, launching into a profanity-laced tirade that included questioning the protester's masculinity.
Jeff Epstein was a touchstone for MAGA to articulate anger at concentrated power. It also powered a business model for the podcasteratti. Trum threatened all of that. Plus, the merger spree starts.
European Diplomatic Blackout: Faced with Kallas’s ineptitude and looming ICC charges over Gaza, the EU loses its moral authority journal-neo.su/2025/07/13/euro…
Kaja Kallas exposes her diplomatic ineptitude as Europe cheerleads genocide. Ursula von der Leyen has hijacked EU foreign policy to serve a neocolonial,
🛑 Via Truely Ann Me Peter #Stassen s’est présenté à la première audience au fond du méga-procès en cours aux #Pays-Bas contre : - l’État néerlandais, - l’ancien Premier ministre Mark #Rutte (aujourd’hui secrétaire général de l’Otan), - le patron de #Pfizer, Albert #Bourla - et le milliardaire #BillGates.
Son collègue l’avocat Arno van #Kessel, arrêté il y a un mois pour des raisons peu claires, est toujours en détention au centre pénitentiaire de très haute sécurité de Vught, indique le média alternatif néerlandais De Andere Krant. Une situation qui évoque celle de l’avocat allemand Reiner #Fuellmich, actuellement détenu dans la prison de haute sécurité de Rosdorf en Allemagne. ◆ Le « plus grand #génocide contre l’humanité qui soit »
Interdire une autre vision. Transformer la dissidence en délit. Dans le meilleur des mondes, grâce aux dangereux tarés (et assassins) de la #mafia #pipolitique, notre argent sert à nous censurer. #censure
Quand l’opinion publique échappe à leur contrôle, ils sortent les crocs. Enquête criminelle contre X. Coalition d’associations subventionnées pour signaler v...
![Firewire in 2005 [photo of a normal firewire 400 connector]
Firewire in 2025 [photo of an 8pin gpu power cable saying 600W]](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/8024141 "Firewire in 2005 [photo of a normal firewire 400 connector]
Firewire in 2025 [photo of an 8pin gpu power cable saying 600W]")
Cory Doctorow
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They were right. The switch from calling it "free software" to calling it "open source" sparked a massive, unbroken wave of adoption, to the point where today it's hard to find anyone who professes animus to "open source," not even Microsoft (who once called it "a cancer").
Two motives animated "open source" partisans: first, they didn't like the ambiguity of "free software." Famously, Richard Stallman (who coined "free software") viewed this ambiguity as a feature, not a bug.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
He liked that "free" had a double meaning: "free as in speech" (an ethical proposition) and "free as in beer" (without cost). Stallman viewed the ambiguity of "free software" as a koan/conversation-starter: a normie, hearing "free software," would inquire as to whether this meant that the software couldn't be sold commercially, which was an opening for free software advocates to explain the moral philosophy of software freedom.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For "open source" partisans, this was a bug, not a feature. They wanted to enlist other hackers to develop freely licensed codes, and convince their bosses to adopt this code for internal and public-facing use. For the "open source" advocates, a term designed to confuse was a liability, a way to turn off potential collaborators ("if you're explaining, you're losing").
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But the "open source" side wasn't solely motivated by a desire to simplify things by jettisoning the requirement to conscript curious bystanders into a philosophical colloquy. Many of them also disagreed with the philosophy of free software. They weren't excited about building a "commons" or in preventing rent extraction by monopolistic firms. Some of them quite liked the idea of someday extracting their own rents.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For these "open source" advocates, the advantage of free software methodologies - publishing code for peer review and third-party improvement - was purely instrumental: it produced better code. Publication, peer review, and unrestricted follow-on innovation are practices firmly rooted in the Enlightenment, and are the foundation of the scientific method.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Allowing strangers to look at your code, critique it, and fix it is a form of epistemic humility, an admission that we are all forever at risk of fooling ourselves, and it's only through adversarial peer review that we can know whether we are right.
This is true! Publishing code makes it better, and prohibitions on code publication make code worse. That's the lesson of the ransomware epidemics of the past decade: these started with a series of leaks from the NSA and CIA.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Both agencies have an official policy of researching widely used software in hopes of finding exploitable bugs and then keeping those bugs secret, so that they will be preserved in the wild and can be exploited when the agencies wish to attack their enemies.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The name for this practice is NOBUS, which stands for "No One But US": we alone are smart enough to find these bugs, so if we discover them and keep them secret, no one else will find them and use them to attack our own people. This is a provably false proposition, and a very dangerous one.
The Vault 7, Vault 8, and NSA cyberweapon leaks blew a hole in NOBUS.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Failures in the agencies' own security protocols resulted in the release of a long list of defects (mostly in versions of Windows, but other OSes and programs were affected). Malicious software authors used these as can openers to pry open millions of computers, enlisting them into botnets and/or shutting them down with ransomware.
These leaks also provided some "ground truth" for researchers who study malicious software.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Once these researchers had a list of which defects the spy agencies had discovered and when, they were able to compare that list of defects that malicious software authors had discovered and exploited in the wild, and estimate the likelihood that a spy agency defect would be independently discovered and abused by the agency's enemies, who they were supposed to be protecting us from. It turns out that the rediscovery rate for spy agency bugs is about 20% per year.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
In other words, there's a one in five chance that a bug that the CIA or NSA is hoarding will be used to attack America and Americans within the year.
NOBUS is a form of software alchemy. Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemist kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were *very* wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review. Both open source and free software partisans claim transparency as a key virtue of their system, because transparency leads to improvement ("with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow").
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
At the outset, "open source" and "free software" were synonyms. All code that was open was also free, and vice-versa. But over the ensuing decades, that changed, as Benjamin "Mako" Hill explained in his 2018 Libreplanet keynote, "How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon":
mako.cc/copyrighteous/librepla…
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How markets coopted free software’s most powerful weapon (LibrePlanet 2018 Keynote)
copyrighteousCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
As Hill explains, the philosophical differences between "open" better code) and "free" code to enhance human freedom) may not have mattered at the outset, but they each served as a kind of pole star for its own adherents, leading them down increasingly divergent paths. Each new technology and practice represented a decision-point for the movement: "Is this something we should embrace as compatible with our project, or should we reject it as antithetical to our goals?"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If you were an "open source" person, the question you asked yourself at each juncture was, "Does this new thing increase code-quality?" If you were a "free software" person, the question you had to answer was, "Does this make people more free?"
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
These value judgments carried enormous weight. They influenced whether hackers would work to improve a given package or pursue a use-case; they determined who would speak or exhibit at conferences, they created (or deflated) "buzz," and they influenced the direction that new license versionss would take, and whether those licenses would be permissible on influential software distribution channels.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
For a movement that runs on goodwill as much as on dollars, the social acceptability of a practice, a license, a technology or a person, mattered.
Hill describes how chasing openness without regard to its consequences for freedom created a strange situation, one in which giant tech monopolists have software freedom, while the rest of us have to make do with open source.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
All the software that powers the cloud systems of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, is freely licensed. You can download it from Github. You can inspect it to your heart's content. You can even do volunteer work to improve it.
But only Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook get to decide whether to run it, and how to configure it.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And since nearly all the code our users depend on takes a loop through a Big Tech cloud, the decisions made by these Big Tech firms set the outer boundaries of what our code can do. They have total freedom while we make do with the crumbs they drop from on high.
In other words, the freedom mattered, and when we forgot about it, we lost it.
Which is not to say that free software doesn't benefit from open source's popularity.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The vast cohort of people who have been won over by open source's instrumental claims to superior code are the top of a funnel that free software partisans can operate to convince these people to consider the ways that their lives have been made more free through open code, and to prioritize freedom, even ahead of code quality.
The free/open source movement is actually a coalition of people who share *some* goals even if they differ on others.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Coalitions are politically powerful. Nearly everything that happens, happens because a coalition has been pulled together:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/06/how…
But coalitions are also brittle, because after they get what they want (transparency for code), then they have to resolve their differences, which means that some members of the coalition are going to be bitterly disappointed.
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Pluralistic: Winning coalitions aren’t always governing coalitions (06 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After all, there's code that we don't want to improve - at least, not if we care about 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.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Human freedom has an inverse relationship to this code: the better this code is, the worse off we all are.
Periodically, some free software advocate will follow this to its logical conclusion and propose a new free software license that prohibits use for some purpose: "you may not use my code in the military," or "you may not use my code for ad-tech," or "you may not use my code in ways that despoil the environment."
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's not surprising that this is a recurring event. After all, if you care about software as a tool for enhancing human freedom, and you notice that your code is being used to make people less free, it's natural to want to do something about it.
And yet, every one of these efforts have foundered - and I think every one will. This isn't because ethics clauses in license are a foolish idea, but because they are logistically transcendentally hard to get right.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
First, there is the problem of writing good "legal code." Free software licenses are extraordinarily hard to get right. Not only do the terms have to spell out the rights and obligations of participants in the software project, but the whole system needs to be designed so that these clauses can be enforced. The right to sue for breaching a license is determined by "standing" - only people who have been injured by a license violation have the right to seek justice in court.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This has proven to be a serious technical challenge in free software licensing, and if you screw it up, you'll end up with an unenforceable license:
pluralistic.net/2021/10/20/viz…
Even if you figure out all that stuff, it's possible for even extremely talented lawyers working in collaboration with the most ethical of technologists to make subtle errors that take years or decades to surface.
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Pluralistic: 20 Oct 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
By that time, there might be millions or even *billions* of works that have been released under the defective version of the license, and no practical way to contact the creators of all those works to get them to relicense under a patched version of the license.
This isn't a hypothetical risk: for more than a decade, every version of every flavor of Creative Commons license had a tiny (but hugely consequential) defect.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
These licenses specified that they "terminated immediately upon any breach." That meant that if you made even the tiniest of errors in following the license terms, you were instantly stripped of the protections of the CC license and could be sued for copyright infringement. Many *billions* of works were released under these older CC licenses.
Today, a new kind of predator called a "copyleft troll" exploits this bug in order to blackmail innocent Creative Commons users.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Multimillion dollar robolawyer firms like Pixsy represent copyleft trolls who release timely images under ancient CC licenses in the hopes that bloggers, social media users, small businesses and nonprofits will use them and make a tiny error in the way they attribute the image. Then Pixsy helps the troll extort hundreds or thousands of dollars from each victim, under threat of a statutory damages claim of $150,000 per infringement:
pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-b…
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A Bug in Early Creative Commons Licenses Has Enabled a New Breed of Superpredator – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Creative Commons spent millions over years, working with a who's-who of international copyright and licensing experts, and it took them more than a decade to fix this bug, and the billions of works released under the old licenses are ticking time-bombs. After all, the copyright in those works will last for 70 years after their authors die, which means that anyone who acquires the copyright to those older images could turn troll and go hunting.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
There's a reason that old FLOSS hands react with instant derision whenever someone proposes making up a new software license. It's the same reason cryptographers are so hostile to the idea of people rolling their own cipehers: no matter how smart and well-intentioned you are, there's a high likelihood that you will screw up and irrevocably place innocent people at risk.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Yes, irrevocably: getting all those creators to relicense their works under a modern CC license is effectively impossible. Even projects with a relatively small number of contributors - like Mozilla - had to resort to throwing away chunks of code whose authors couldn't be located and paying someone to rewrite them under a new license.
Those are reasons not to come up with new free and/or open licenses, period.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But on top of that, there's a special set of confounders that arise when ethics clauses are added to free/open licenses.
The first of these is the definitional problem. Even seemingly simple categories can elude consensus on definition. Again, the Creative Commons licenses are instructive here: from the outset, CC licenses let creators toggle an ethics clause, called the "NonCommercial" (NC) flag. Works licensed under "NC" couldn't be used commercially. Seems simple, right?
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Cory Doctorow
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Wrong. For years - to this day - CC users have been unable to consistently agree on what constitutes a "commercial use." If you post something in your personal capacity to a commercial service, is that "commercial?" Well, it had better not be, because *anything* you find online is going to have some kind of commercial enterprise involved in getting that file to you: a long-haul fiber provider, a data-center, a hosting company, a cloud company, a social media service, etc, etc.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
If "noncommercial" means "no one can make any money as a result of the distribution of this work," then an NC license would mean that works couldn't be distributed at all (even if you're just printing off copies of a cool image at home and stapling them to telephone poles, the printer ink company and the staple company are making money off of every copy you post).
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
The CC organization did extensive polling, conducted seminars, consulted experts, and produced a 255-page document that is fascinating and subtle:
mirrors.creativecommons.org/de…
And even with this document, CC users and creators *still* argue about whether some users are in and out of bounds.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Now, the CC NC ethics clause is the *best case* for an ethics clause in a license. CC is a centralized organization that has total authority over the text of CC licenses and exercises near-total control over their interpretation.
Now imagine how a hypothetical ethics clause in a software license would perform, given the CC NC experience. Compared with, say, "military/nonmilitary," the "commercial/noncommercial" distinction is trivial to draw.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Is Ford - whose cars are in DoD motor-pools - a "military" user? What if Ford decides to boycott the Pentagon, but the Navy still buys a bunch of used Ford Focuses from a wrecking yard and fixes them up with Ford parts they buy at an Autozone: does Ford now become a "military" user of free/open software?
Categories are clusters, not shapes.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This is why the right wing troll mantra "What is a woman?" is so effective: women aren't *what*s; they are *who*s, and if you try to come up with a definition that encompasses all the people who are women, it will stretch to dozen of pages and still miss people out. This isn't unique to women - almost every category defies exhaustive definition. Famously, there is no such thing as a fish:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Such_…
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comedy podcast of the QI Elves
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Neither is there any such thing as a name, an address or a date:
github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-f…
Obviously, the fact that "name" is a slippery concept doesn't stop us from introducing ourselves and referring to one another.
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GitHub - kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood: 😱 Falsehoods Programmers Believe in
GitHubCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But imagine now that we are going to create billions of works whose copyright will endure for more than a century, and if any of them fails to refer to someone by their name correctly, then any of millions of people, some of them not even born yet, could ruin some software contributor's life and maybe the lives of thousand or millions of users of their software.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
And "name" - like "noncommercial" - is an easy case. The hard cases are things like "military/nonmilitary," "fossil fuel-sector/non-fossil fuel sector" etc etc. Big, distributed projects with informal institutions and leaders are poorly suited to adjudicating *any* of these definitional questions, but toothy ethics clauses require these loose ad-hocracies to create and enforce definitions of the most pernicious and slippery concepts of all.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I want to be clear that I'm not opposed to the idea of an ethics clause in free/open licenses. I make extensive use of both the NC and commercial CC licenses, after all. My objections are practical, not philosophical.
A couple weeks ago, I traveled to Rochdale in Greater Manchester to give the opening keynote at the 2025 Coop Congress.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
After my talk, I was on a panel with Chris Croome, who has been campaigning for a co-op software license:
> either enforce co-operation and sharing and do not allow code to be privatised (made proprietary) or code that is released under terms that dictate that if the code is used to run a business the nature of the business must be a co-operative.
community.coops.tech/t/co-oper…
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Co-operative Software Licenses
Cooperative Technologists Community Discourse ForumCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I've been thinking about this ever since and I think all my concerns about other ethics clauses apply here. Admittedly, there is a widely accepted and mature definition of "co-op," the seven "Rochdale Principles":
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochdale…
These have been around since 1937, and many of the seeming ambiguities in the language have been resolved through debate over the past 88 years.
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organizing guidelines for a co-op
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
But there are plenty of entities that are recognizable as "co-ops" that exist outside of the UK, the Anglosphere and the global north that don't embrace all of these principles, or embrace them in ways that fit into the consensus as to their meaning that has emerged among Rochdale-derived co-ops. It's not merely that a "co-op" license might exclude these co-ops.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
It's also that the enforcement mechanism for software licenses is that individual software authors retain the copyright to their lines of code, and use copyright law to threaten and punish people who violate the license terms.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This means that you could have a pool of potentially thousands of software authors, *and* their literary estates, who would have the right - for more than a century - to attack co-ops that use "co-operatively licensed" software on the grounds that the differ in their interpretation of what is - and is not - a co-op.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
What's more, there are plenty of groups that could organize as a co-op and satisfy the software license's definition, who might nevertheless not be "ethical" by the lights of the co-op movement. Think of a firm of mercenaries that set up as a worker co-op (if this strikes you as implausible, I remind you that the most vicious, human-rights-abusing cops in the world are mostly members of "unions").
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
So a co-op license creates three risks:
i. Excluding co-operators because of small differences in which co-op principles they adopt;
ii. Including co-operators who are structured as compliant co-ops, but do terrible things; and
iii. Putting license users at the risk of copyleft trolls who exploit ambiguity in the definition of "co-op" to extort massive "settlement fees" from software users.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That all said, a co-op license has positive aspects as well. Remember what happened when we stopped stressing "freedom" in our software licenses: we got the code quality of "open," applied to all kinds of code, including code that destroys freedom. I've been involved with co-ops since I was a pre-teen, and I've experienced firsthand what happens when a co-op forgets its ethical basis in favor of instrumental goals.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Take the Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Canada's most beloved and successful consumer co-op. MEC was inspired by the US outdoor gear co-op REI, and it served Canadians proudly for decades. But like most consumer co-ops, MEC had very low member involvement, so a cabal of MBA-poisoned looters to were able to take over MEC's board, change the bylaws, and then flip the co-op to a ruthless American private equity fund:
pluralistic.net/2020/09/16/spi…
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Pluralistic: 16 Sep 2020 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
MEC isn't a co-op anymore. The board's argument was that keeping MEC a co-op wasn't as important as infusing it with capital so it could source the goods its members wanted and offer them at reasonable prices. Joke's on them: after five years of PE looting, MEC's quality sucks and its prices are sky-high.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Institutional structure (like whether you are a co-op or not) can *influence* the kind of activity an organization engages in, but it can't *control* it. Keeping enshittification at bay requires multiple, overlapping constraints that prevent the institution from caving into the worst instincts of its worst members.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
That's why I'm rooting for Bluesky to get more federated. It's nice that they're a B-corp, but that alone won't stop a dedicated investor class from replacing the current management with enshittifiers who destroy the lives of tens of millions of Bluesky users. However, if a large plurality of Bluesky users weren't actually *on* Bluesky, but on federated servers, they could credibly threaten Bluesky's business by defederating with it if it enshittified:
pluralistic.net/2025/01/23/def…
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Pluralistic: Defense (of the internet) (from billionaires) in depth (23 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
So maybe the prospect of losing access to all of its business-critical software could have acted as a check on MEC's board and prevented them from sleazing up to private equity vampires. This is certainly a possible benefit to a co-op ethics clause in a software license. I'm not convinced that it outweighs the risks, though.
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Cory Doctorow
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I'm a free software person. There are bitter free software partisans who think that the open source people stole our revolution. I understand their outrage. But I also think we left an open goal. In retrospect, choosing a deliberately confusing name in the hopes of sparking conversations was a tactical error. The cohort of potential movement supporters who also enjoy word-games is smaller than the cohort who are put off by being deliberately confused.
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Cory Doctorow
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I also don't think it's a problem that the software freedom coalition includes people who value software freedom for purely instrumental reasons - because open code is better code. I *do* think it's a problem that they are the senior partners in the coalition and have steered it for a quarter-century. After all, they steered it into this ditch where tech monopolists have free software and we all make do with open source.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Coalitions, though, are hugely important. Take the as-yet-nameless coalition lined up against corporate power, which has defied political science's laws of gravity, pushing antitrust enforcement across the world, against the world's largest and most powerful corporations:
pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mam…
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Pluralistic: Antitrust defies politics’ law of gravity (28 Jun 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.netCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
This coalition needs a name. I often cite James Boyle's explanation of the role the word "ecology" played in bringing together thousands of disparate issues (spotted owls, ozone depletion) under a single banner and turning them into a *movement*. The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Almost all of our definitional terms are "anti-something," from "antitrust" to "antifascist." We have no end of words to describe what we stand against (even "enshittification"'s opposite is "disenshittification"), but we still lack a word to express what we're *for*.
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Cory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic:
clarionwriteathon.com/members/…
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Clarion Write-a-Thon | Cory Doctorow
clarionwriteathon.comCory Doctorow
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
Image:
Muhammad Mahdi Karim
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…
GNU FDL
gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.html
--
EC
flickr.com/photos/baumderjusti…
CC BY-SA 2.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
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Guillotine 8
FlickrStrypey
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •(1/2)
@pluralistic
> The anti-corporate-power movement doesn't have a name that can unite labor, climate, environment, antitrust, anticorruption, antigenocide, antiracist, antisexist, antitransphobic groups under one banner
Back in the 90s we organised under the banner of a loose international coalition called People's Global Action. Which corporate media reframed as "anti-globalisation movement". Many people called it the "alter-globalisation movement", or later, the global justice movement.
Adam Katz
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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Floon
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
All of the "freedom" labels have been co-opted by the (ptui) Libertarians.
The words I think of that aren't "anti-X" are "civil defense" or "integrity" kinds of ideas.
"Civil Integrity Movement" maybe: it combines the definitions of integrity, in the sense of having a good moral sense, and of keeping things whole and unbroken.
Joe M
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
I'm also a Free Software person, but I parted ways with the FSF a long time ago because they fundamentally misunderstand how social movements work. Successful laws and contracts are not there to enforce behaviour, they are there to codify the consensus on acceptable behaviour.
I have never murdered anyone. This isn't because laws provide consequences if I do, it's because I think living in a society where everyone lives in fear of being randomly killed is bad and so I subscribe to the consensus that we all agree not to murder each other. Laws against murder exist because there are always a few outliers and you need a rule to deal with them. Similarly, contracts work best when there is broad agreement between both parties about what they are both going to do. The contract assumes both are acting in good faith and then does two things:
The problem with FSF licenses and their derivatives is that they don't start by building that consensus, they start by assuming bad faith. At that point, you're immediately shifting to an adversarial stance.
When you present people with laws that they consider unjust or contracts that they don't feel reflect social agreements, you end up with people trying to find loopholes. Sometimes they just ignore the laws / contracts entirely and you end up with widespread civil disobedience or mass contract violation. Now you have selective enforcement problems.
The people who are most able to find valid loopholes are the ones who are able to employ the most lawyers. The simple act of writing a complex license shifts power from individuals to corporations.
The biggest failure of the Free Software movement has been to fail to show any benefits for most users of the Four Freedoms, except the zeroth. The linguistic problem of Free Software and freeware being conflated is strengthened by the fact that, for 99% of users, the sole benefits that they directly perceive from Free Software are the same as those in freeware.
There needs to be a variation of Conway's Law that talks about the relationship between the structure of a piece of code and the underlying business and economic systems behind it. Proprietary software systems naturally become closed all-encompassing ecosystems because the goal for such a system is to make sure that users spend more time in it. Interoperability that lets people take their data and leave is a down side. Third-party plugins are useful because they let other people build things that require end users to pay you, but plugins that could grow enough functionality to eventually remove you as a dependency are a danger. The most desirable end state for proprietary software looks like iOS and the Apple App Store: the vendor controls a critical component that everything depends on and also the distribution channel for everything that extends this base layer.
Free Software systems that aim to reproduce this structure of self-contained siloed apps are doomed to failure. They are playing the proprietary software game, with none of the advantages that proprietary software vendors enjoy in such a world.
If you really want to build a Free Software system, you need to build simple, understandable, composable systems that individual end users can easily extend and tailor to their needs. The distinction between a document, a plugin, and an app are meaningless in such a system: users have full access to all of the functionality of the underlying system and can trivially extend it and share their extensions with others. Licenses like the GPL are a liability in such a system because they impose complex legal requirements on things that should be normal uses of the system. Treating extending and modifying a program as unusual things that most end users won't need to do and therefore where it's okay to introduce legal friction is implicitly starting from the assumption that you will fail to build a system where most users benefit at all from freedoms one to three.
marado
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
(Almada Negreiros, 1921; translation from the original Portuguese by me)
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Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
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fairydoctor
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •Sensitive content
the SCP Wiki for the last number of years has wanted to update our license from CC-BY-SA 3.0 to CC-BY-SA 4.0 to give the writers & artists more freedom over their work
presently, in order for the site to move to 4, under 3 we have to reach out to every author & the site turned 17 years yesterday
like what you wrote about firefox, we'd have to do the same (it's a possibility when the site jumps from wikidot to it's own wiki-platform, & from 3.0 to 4.0)
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Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary
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Pa
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Jorge Candeias
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •The main problem of a word to describe what we're for is that it would be immediately distorted and destroyed by fascist propagandists.
Take social justice for a prime example. What's wrong with that as a concept? Who wouldn't want a bit of justice in society?
And yet, look at what they did to it. For many people, SJW is a slur. And it is intended as such by fascist propagandists.
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Martin Vermeer FCD
in reply to Jorge Candeias • • •MidniteMikeWrites
in reply to Martin Vermeer FCD • • •@martinvermeer @jorgecandeias Language has always been a battleground of essentially contested concepts. I don't think that's a reason to avoid labels, even in a world eager to mislabel you.
Anyway, I think this movement is a huge tent of other existing ones. People working to expand democracy/dignity across economic, social, and political dimensions. Not sure one term is desirable for this, but maybe we should recognize we're addressing the same problem from different angles.
masyukun
in reply to Cory Doctorow • • •This coalition seems based on human rights. The very phrase is racist (to Klingons, per Star Trek VI).
If something is Pro-Human, it's necessarily unified against non-human AI and corporate entities, enforcing a simple hierarchy when they're in conflict.
It could start by solidifying the sanctity of human lives: their right to privacy, their right to identity and expression, and their right to humane labor.