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FOSS programmers, what do you think of horrible people using your software? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago by zephyr@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I just learned that Nmap is almost GPL except that they revoked the license specifically for SCO group for their SCO–Linux disputes.

This got me thinking, what do open source programmers think of evil companies or horrible people using their software?

Don't get me wrong, FOSS software by its nature can't be controlled or strictly prevented of being used. But in case of companies like SCO, that is a thing that at least can cause them headache and they risk getting into legal trouble. A programmer for example can modify GPL to make so that his software can't be used by Microsoft or Facebook, but it is GPL for everybody else.

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[–] ssm@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 4 months ago

I'm an OpenBSD user & ports maintainer, and while I don't totally agree with the permissive ethos, I'll summerize it the best I can:

Permissive licensing (anyone can use your code for any reason, as long as they give attribution) means more people are using your software, which is improving the quality of software in the world, and regardless of it is being used for nefarious purposes or not, it increases the probability of your software becoming a standard. Copyleft/GPL can lead to total rejection of software by large proprietary/corpo entities, and lead to in-house proprietary implementations instead. A good example is MacOS, which if BSD didn't exist with the license it did, we could have very well have ended up with with two systems as non-portable as Windows instead of one.

My personal opinion on the matter is that your license should change depending on what type of software you're writing. I think permissive is good for libraries and highly portable applications. For something like a game on the other hand, I think something like the GPL isn't good enough; I would pick a license that would would prevent any commercial use whatsoever. I don't care about the purity of open source or what does or doesn't qualify open source or free software; I view it as zealotry, and licenses are a tool, not an ideology.