That’s actually a good idea. A very simple “click the frog” captcha might be solvable by an AI but it would work as a way to make it more expensive for crawlers without wasting compute resources (energy!) on the user or slowing down old devices to a crawl. So in some ways it could be a better alternative to Anubis.
The Free Software movement wasn’t really anti-commercial, they explicitly allow commercial purposes as part of the freedoms to protect, it’s part of the first freedoom they defend, “freedom zero”.
And it’s not like the open source movement wasn’t inherently political either… wanting more companies to join the movement is actually a political position.
But also, it’s not like the Free Software movement didn’t want to have more companies adopt their philosophy… they did want that, I mean that would have been awesome if it had happened. And when possible the FSF has actively tried to convince companies to get on board, they even have run programs to help companies promote themselves as certified by the FSF, such as the “Respects Your Freedom (RYF)” certification.
What makes the Free Software movement different is that they actively see proprietary software as evil. They see freedom as a right, something mandatory, not something to merely be “open” to. Going out of your way to not use closed source software, to the point of crippling yourself digitally if necessary, is then the ethically correct behavior. Whereas the “open source” movement sees it more as an option, something that can be useful but not strictly necessary, they wont consider it inherently bad/evil to use proprietary.
This is akin to someone considering buying ethically sourced shoes as something optional vs considering it a moral obligation so as to not be complicit to evil practices. Or say… saving energy being an option that might be convenient for you personally vs a moral obligation with the planet.
The business model at the time for most commercial projects was based on offering software as a product, not as a service, so they didn’t want to release their code. When eventually the shift towards services started to happen, companies gravitated towards the “open” side because it allowed them to take advantage of free software while retaining proprietary software for those situations in which it benefited them, without being flagged as “evil” by the same community they were working with.
No, what makes the poor majority choose to voluntarily vote against their own interest and shoot themselves in the foot is not the fact that there’s a powerful minority, it’s the manipulation.
Are you not aware of how popular capitalism is with the masses? the poor majority is primarily capitalist in all the capitalist countries. The majority disagrees with your idea of communism being the solution.
Manipulation is the name of the game. Appeals to compliance and stability, pushing narratives to vulnerable people in ways that is hard for them to examine them critically, politics being intermixed with social psychology, group-thinking and sometimes even reaching the levels of religious belief.
Manipulation is a tactic used by Nations of all colors… and it’s specially obvious with governments that explicitly seek lack of transparency, opaque systems, suppression of political opposition, silencing dissent, censorship… and… yes, lack of separation of powers (which does help with all of those). Like I sad before, the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in.
The moment you punish people for expressing being unhappy is the moment you can no longer trust that people will be honest when asked if they are happy. This adds extra levels of complexity, it only seems simple if you only look at it from a very superficial surface level.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood completely, I didn’t read it right. For some reason I thought you were talking about the router / wifi service being SOWPL.
what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism?
You are assuming that people will never ever choose the group of old men… or that the group of old men isn’t gonna create an alternative progressive looking group that actually is just as bad, but happens to be very good at propaganda, marketing and appealing to popular social media poison trends / manipulation.
And I say “never ever” because the most dangerous thing is that a malicious group only needs to gain power once, in such a no-barriers system, to impose a dictatorship.
If electing officials were that easy, the people in Berlin would not have needed a referendum to push for this law, the elected officials would have pushed for it instead.
Of course, you can advocate for having direct democracy at any step of the way, but then you are essentially also doing separation of power, since you are essentially translocating the tribunal to the entire population, and it would be just as separate and varied as the whole country itself. I’d argue that direct democracy is the opposite of centralization of power.
It’s so much of a hurdle that all fascist regimes have been forced to weaken the division and ultimatelly break it completelly in order to build a fascist regime.
A “progressive law” is easy for a fascist in power to overthrow if they actually are able to weaken the division of power.
Why do you think Trump has been able to do a lot more in this term than in the previous one? Because he has been able to weaken that division, the judicial system is on his side, and he has a lot more connections with people inside the state now.
Ok,. so lets imagine your example from Berlin: would the situation have been better if there was no division of power and the same group of old men in a tribunal were the ones deciding the referendum should be made, deciding what laws should be passed, how should they be written and in which manner should they be executed, with which level of strength?
Division of power also means that if a group of old men in the legislative dictates a horrible anti constitutional law, there’s a chance the law can be repelled due to the judiciary being compelled to do so.
He didn’t say that separation by itself is sufficient. So naturally just having separation is not enough.
However, it’s a fact that a dictator needs, by definition, to break the separation of power in order to truly become the authoritarian leader with control over the country.
So NOT having separation of power is actually necessary to destroy a democracy.
I feel that trying to defend those things that someone would need to break in order to remove democracy is not a bad idea if we want to maintain democracy.
There are also a lot of other things that are necessary for a dictatorship… such as the dictator not being held accountable (meaning… transparency and mechanisms for accountability would be another principle to maintain democracy), or the dictator suppressing political opposition or dissent (so protecting opposition, whistleblowers and dissent, instead of prosecuting it would be another one). And I’m sure there are many others.
I mean… sure, you can, in theory, have a democracy without those things… but the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in…
IANAL, but I feel that coffee shop case would not be different if the software were under AGPL… if you are providing a service to other people, even if “the other people” are the customers to your shop, it could be argued that under the terms of the AGPL (not to be confused with GPL) they should have the right to see the source of the service that they are making use of.
But if the SOWPL requirement really does apply to private code that isn’t providing service to others, the implication would be that even if you are the only user (no coffee shop customer), and even if you are the only one who knows about it, you would still need to make the source code public in some way… which I feel this is very impractical and probably unenforceable anyway.
Even if you did block it, the fact that you blocked it is also trackable… so it might actually single you out even more, and it’ll still allow them to fingerprint your browser (you can test your fingerprint here).
It might make more sense to randomize / spoof the data so that it becomes inconsistent and useless so that you aren’t identifiable.
Aren’t all motivations emotional?
I mean… what would be the “logical” reason to use FOSS? I feel you can’t just use pure logic as a form of motivation, ever. Something that only uses logic and not emotions cannot take any action like a computer algorithm made of pure logic with no hard-coded instincts that simply operates mathematically, in reality there’s no logical reason to act in one direction or another… morals/goals are always emotionally grounded.
I feel the problem has more to do with social reasons, and pragmatic reasons.
What determines a behavior being “extreme” often has more to do with what is the average behavior of the people you surround yourself with. It’s a relative term.
In a world where everyone used free software and saw that as the norm, with things being designed around software being free, someone going the extra mile just to use proprietary software would be seen as “extreme” too.
Also, I’m not convinced that the numeric balance of who killed the most from the other side in a war is what should determine who is in the wrong.
The thing is that this would mean you also need to list the non-free projects that you are looking an alternative for (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to map them to their free software equivalents). And in order to not repeat the same lists, you will end up also having to list equivalents between closed source software (since the alternatives to Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop are likely gonna be the same).
This essentially would make it a subset of existing places like https://alternativeto.net/ where you can find alternatives to a software and filter to only show the alternatives that are open source.