Software developer, intermittent indie game dev, formerly u/captainbland on reddit. Also kind of interested in medical imaging etc.

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Cake day: February 5th, 2025

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  • CapriciousDay@lemmy.mlOPtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlParadox of tolerance license
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    1 day ago

    Strictly speaking these all do something similar-ish at face value but actually quite different in terms of mechanism and target. I think the unpopularity of a lot of these licensing structures is also down to lack of legal verification in a lot of cases.

    The illegality possibility does warrant careful consideration, but I suspect in many cases regimes which would oppose this kind of license would be making the use and enforcement of software fairly selective in any case. If it is made illegal, it’s made illegal by the respective government, not the software author or license writer.

    A question is then raised as to what degree the implied open source requirement that open source should be leveraged by e.g. Nazis actually benefits developers and users. Or whether it is in effect a kind of appeasement as no doubt use which contradicts those values (and hence promotes freedom) is illegal already. Those uses which are orthogonal to that aim may be selectively targeted for arbitrary reasons such as the identity of the user.


  • Strictly speaking I think such provisions would be unenforceable in those circumstances anyway so doesn’t the effect kind of cancel out? Don’t get me wrong I get where you’re coming from but why would we imagine such a license has an effect in nations that are already hostile to those ideas and probably have broken judicial systems anyway?