I really wish there was viable replacement for Prettier with the same language support coverage. Every Prettier release introduces new breaking bugs for me, (I'm not talking about formatting updates I'm talking about formatting that never settles or outright crashes, etc.) and they never fix them. The plugin system for Prettier is also the worst I've ever seen, it's a nightmare to write a plugin.
Prettier is one of the hardest projects to maintain. There’s so much code necessary to format ALL of the languages. I haven’t checked out the plugin system.
Also the core philosophy of prettier is to basically ignore people’s aesthetic preferences about code. Which causes lots of flame wars in the issues.
They really do fix crashes if you submit PRs though. Do you not like contributing to open source but still feel empowered to complain about it? Opening a ticket with a good reproduction case is also contributing but sometimes it’s necessary to put a bit more effort into tools.
Formatting HTML is a much less painful and slow task than formatting TS. There are a few good and fast tools for that anyway. Also, you typically don't use a lot of HTML files along with substantial amounts of TS; the latter usually does JSX.
Formatting SSCS should be trivial compared to even formatting HTML, which is trivial compared to formatting TS. They took on the principal task first, and did not allow doing the trivial tasks early to inform any implementation decisions, which should be optimized for the hardest and most important task.
My house came with a Nest installed and I think it looks cool so I left it in but never gave it the wifi password and turned off absolutely all the crazy "smart" features it had. Now it's a really neat looking dumb thermostat and I want nothing else.
My house also came with a nest, and I also never connected it to my network, but for me nest was a terrible dumb thermostat.
It constantly tried to infer schedules and change the temperature on its own. I would set the temperature, come back an hour later to find that it changed itself back to what it thought it should be.
Also, there was no way to just activate the fan. I live in a very temperate climate and I generally like to keep a few windows open but run the fan to circulate air through the house.
I sold the nest and now a $15 dumb thermostat from the local hardware store now lets me set a temperature and it won't randomly change it when it feels like it. And it has a switch to turn on the fan.
I managed to disable the scheduling system, as even that was too smart for me (I had similar troubles as you). All it does now is: set temperature; allow switching between heat, cold, both, or none; allow turning on fan-only for X hours. Maybe yours wasn't wired correctly for the fan? No idea.
I agree it's very good but the UI is still usually an unusable, scroll-jacking disaster. I've found it's best to let a chat sit for around a few minutes after it has finished printing the AI's output. Finding the `ms-code-block` element in dev tools and logging `$0.textContext` is reliable too.
It's the company. Letting incompetent people who are vocal rise to the top is a part of Google's culture, and the internal performance review process discourages excellence - doing the thousand small improvements that makes a product truly great is invisible to it, so nobody does it.
Software that people truly love is impossible to build in there.
4- UI spammed with garbled text if you attach large file
5- Prompt rejected with no error, prompt text returns to chat input but attachments are deleted
6- Pasting small amounts of text takes a few seconds in long chats
Annoying:
1- Scroll is hijacked when the prompt is accepted by server and thinking starts, instead of when you send the prompt or not at all.
---
If you haven't experienced these then I can only hazard a guess that you're keeping your chats at less than 100k token context or you're using AIStudio. The major issues happen when you push it with 90k token prompts or 200k token cumulative chats. They don't all have the same precise trigger, though, some are connected to long chats, others to big attachments, etc.
I've noticed this has gotten a bit better lately, they have obviously been making a lot of UI changes to studio. But yeah, the scroll-jacking as response chunks are streamed in is incredibly frustrating since the model is pretty wordy.
I should add as well, on long complex threads the UI can become completely unusable. I'll hover over the tab and see it using over 2Gb of memory in chrome. Every so often I have to open a completely new tab, cut-n-paste the url and continue the conversation in that new tab (where the memory tends to drop back down to 600MB).
> The median delay between speakers in a human to human conversation is zero milliseconds
What about on phone calls? When I'm on a call with customer support they definitely wait for it to be clear that I'm done talking before responding, just like AI does.
I’ve participated in many hackathons in recent years and they’ve all been great. I’ve not heard of anything like what you described (though I’m also not anywhere near CA).
You can, but they ask that you contact them to set up a contract. It's addressed here on the site:
>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
>If you want to run an unbranded or white-label version of Anubis, please contact Xe to arrange a contract.
Thanks for the information. Just to confirm, with the stock deployment it is not possible to remove the character, but there is an option to set the interface language for users? Spanish is supported?
My "workaround" for this MIT-licensed software that does not allow me a simple and common customization was to have my reverse proxy redirect requests to the images. https://git.lyte.dev/lytedev/nix/pulls/92/files
I did so, though I would hardly call using MIT FOSS for my personal projects a breach of the social contract of open source. This was easier than forking, building a docker image, etc. I'm guessing it will be much easier for others, too, since the recommended config has you dink around with reverse proxy configuration no matter what.
You are breaking the social contract of the project, not the legal one. The MIT license is the legal contract. The additional social contract is established by the author asking (without legal teeth) that you not do exactly what you did by removing the branding.
Compare to a take-a-penny-leave-a-penny tray from an era past. You are legally allowed to scoop up all the pennies into a bag, and leave the store, then repeat at the neighboring store, and make a few bucks. You'd be an asshole, but not face legal trouble. You "followed the rules" to the letter. But guess what? If you publish an easy how-to guide with "one weird trick" for making some quick cash, and people start adopting your antisocial behavior and emptying out change trays, you've forced the issue and now either a) businesses will stop offering this convenience or b) the rules around it will be tightened and the utility will be degraded. In the concrete case of Anubis, the maintainers may decide to stop contributing their time to this useful software or place a non-FOSS license on it in an attempt to stop gain-maximizing sociopaths from exploiting their efforts.
I'm surprised to read this from you, somebody I and many others hold in high regard as accepting and knowledgeable, insulting someone's character because they didn't like some specific aspect of your work or opinions or chose to ignore an ask in this particular use case.
I didn't implement this out of fear or some lack of courage. In fact I had the original avatars up for quite a while. I simply wanted my own logo so visitors wouldn't be potentially confused. It seemed to fit the use case and there was no way to achieve what I wanted without reaching out. I didn't feel comfortable bugging you or anybody on account of my tiny little no-traffic git forge even though, yes, that is what you politely asked for (and did not demand).
I think if you do feel this strongly you might consider changing the software's license or the phrasing of the request in the documentation. Or perhaps making it very clear that no matter how small, you want to be reached out to for the whitelabel version.
I think the success story of Anubis has been awesome to read about and follow and seeing how things unfold further will be fun to watch and possibly even contribute to. I'm personally rooting for you and your project!
You are correct in that I ignored a specific request, but you are also ignoring the larger social contract of open source that is also at play. To release software with a certain license has a social component of its own that seems to be unaccounted for here.
Your analogy to me seems imprecise, as analogies tend to be when it comes to digital goods. I'm not taking pennies in any sense here, preventing the next person from making use of some public good.
You can make a similar argument for piracy or open source, and yet... Here we all still are and open source has won for the most part.
I think back to the original idea of free software.
The GPL protects users from any restrictions the author wants to use. No additional restrictions are allowed, whether technical or legal.
In this case, the restriction is social, but is a restriction nonetheless (some enforce it by harassment, some by making you feel bad).
But you could ignore it, even fork it and create a white label version, and be proud of it (thereby bypassing the restriction). Donate voluntarily if you want to contribute, without being restricted technically, legally, or socially.
I agree with your comment here, and would add that I believe the license and open source in general has a certain social restriction as well and implies how the software may or may not be used, which is part of what makes this discussion nuanced and difficult, as it appears there are two true and opposing points.
And the author is breaking a social contract of not shoving stuff I don't want to see in an excessive amount (or being a contributor of it). Before I wouldn't mind to see some anime here or there, it's quite cute for most people. But lately I see it in much more places and more aggressive.
Some project even took it to the next level and displayed a furry porn. I think anime and furry graphics are related, esp. in the weird obsession of the people to shove it to the unsuspecting people, but since it's "cute" it's passable. Well unless it gets into the porn territory.
On the other hand I applaud the author for an interesting variation of making the free product slightly degraded so people are incentived to donate money. The power of defaults and their misuse.
Personally I'm not fan of enshittification of any kind even a slight one even when it's to my own detriment.
> And the author is breaking a social contract of not shoving stuff I don't want to see in an excessive amount.
Except the author is not shoving any stuff at you. Author doesn't owe anything to you and can do whatever they want and you doesn't owe the author the obligation to use their software.
It's not business, it's a person giving something free to the world and asking people who uses it to play the game. You can chose to not play the game or to not use it, but you can't act like your issue with an anime character is the author's fault. Just don't install it on your server and go ahead.
Not directly. But he knows it will get used in the current unfortunate landscape and that people will put it in front of their web pages. Then as a visitor of these pages I'm forced to see it. So yes indirectly he is shoving this stuff at the people.
> Some project even took it to the next level and displayed a furry porn. I think anime and furry graphics are related, esp. in the weird obsession of the people to shove it to the unsuspecting people, but since it's "cute" it's passable. Well unless it gets into the porn territory.
This is your weird association and hang-up. That's on you to deal with, not Anubis or the rest of the internet.
Well that's extremely shortsighted, almost to the point of blindness.
The author clearly went out of the way to put code in to signal to people that if you use the software and you are a company earning revenue using it, to help support the project.
This is clearly breaking the social contract that comes along with that MIT license, guided by what the author says.
When you break the social contract, and by doing so you induce people to follow you to do the same, eventually (given sufficient breakage) you end up in a world on fire; filled with violence and destruction.
This happens because non-violent conflict resolution can't take place without society, which itself is based on the social contract. A contract that you broke by trying to work around the authors intent.
It is well known that with people, "What you do in the small things, you do in big things that matter when everything is on the line". This piece of old wisdom, shows a cognitive preferential bias.
Ipso facto, you are supporting that world on fire filled with violence coming into being by those actions.
Sure you don't see anything wrong now, but that is blindness, and you can hold that isolated view right now while society is still in a working state, but actions and choices matter, and society moves towards the aggregate, either towards stability or towards chaos.
There is a time that is not far off, where that kind of behavior is going to have severe consequences.
If you did this without any resistance or seeing this as wrong, you have to ask yourself how many other things you've done that you just didn't notice? Are your kids modeling this blindness in themselves? Mimicking you as a role model.
Blindness puts people at a significant disadvantage because they often can't see the dangers they often create indirectly for themselves.
While I think you have a point buried in there worth discussing, I simply can't equate me wanting slightly different functionality from MIT-licensed software and making it happen equivalent to these kinds of breakdowns in society.
The author also went of their way to indicate this license, for what it's worth.
> You ignore the authors words and published intent, and go so far as to undo them
I guess I took the MIT license as the author's word and intent. Are you saying their choice of license is not? It clearly outlines that I am free to use the software without restriction which you conveniently leave out of your core argument.
If you want to talk about open source and the social contract, this is the heart of it: freedom, which I have exercised. If I was using it for commercial purposes and doing something more against the "spirit of open source" I think I might be inclined to agree with you. But I'm not.
the license enumerates the rights the author has bestowed upon you.
the funding page clarifies their intent:
>Anubis is provided to the public for free in order to help advance the common good. In return, we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment.
you are of course free to do whatever you want with this code, the license is as you point out quite clear. but so is the intent, and feigning ignorance of the author's intent is disingenuous at best.
I'm not aware of any ignorance (feigned or otherwise) on my part or in my comments about my ignoring the author's request. I'm aware that I am doing so and have made that clear and shared with others that also would choose to do so as they deem reasonable.
If you'll allow me to make assumptions, given that the author neither demands -- and is, in fact, explicit about not doing so -- nor licenses the software in such a way as to prevent this use case, I am guessing the author had at least some intent or foreknowledge around some folks wanting to swap the images. I further assumed that such use cases were for instances such as those the author wrote Anubis for to begin with, protecting small git forges with little resources. Now, I admit my server is not small and I have resources, and so am happy to pay for and donate towards open source software, but in this case the only option was to contact the author, which is something I deemed overkill in this case. I would simply wait and see how the author planned to approach the issue and revisit at that time.
Perhaps I've made the wrong move socially or ethically, which I think is at least a worthwhile discussion to have, and if I should decide I feel like I've made an ethically sideways choice, I will eat my words and make things right as best as I can.
However, if we're going to talk about intent, I an guessing there is a bit more nuance to bring to the conversation. Or perhaps the author can chime in or update the documentation to be more clear, because the liberal license says quite a lot about intent to me. I think it's at least a little disingenuous to say that the software license carries no intent behind it (spirit of open source and all that) and is "only" an enumeration of my rights.
in fact, the author has chimed in and you still choose to argue with him. at this point i think it's clear that you aren't confused about his intent at all, you just don't care about it.
I never claimed confusion, but that there is more to "intent" here than what one page of documentation says.
I think it's clear the author "desires" or "wants" folks to keep the images. However, I think the author also "wants" users to use the software without restriction, hence the license.
If I say I intend one thing in one place, but then also say another thing orthogonal to that thing elsewhere that seems to be at odds, what was my intent truly? If my actions do not line up with my words, how do external parties judge what is the socially acceptable approach given my two statements that are at odds?
I simply think the choice of license says a lot more about intent, and is, in fact, the mechanism by which a creator decides how their code may be used. If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way, the license is _the_ way to have control over that.
I believe this conversation is a bit more nuanced than you are making it out to be and the discussion around "what is open source" is where this discussion begins and ends. I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", which, I agree with you, seems clear, but is not expressed fully, given the chosen unrestricted license.
I disagree, and the fact that you can't see this is wrong, and ethically dubious is the most important part of the problem. This is blindness, and worse it is a willful blindness.
I wasn't even aware that you had reached out directly where the author made themselves clear. The license doesn't supersede the authors words.
When there's a contradiction, you take the authors words and intent first, the same as any hierarchical set of documents. The authors words will be far more detailed than any license, and the social contract comes first so everyone can continue receiving benefit under it. There are edge cases, this isn't one of them.
By focusing on the license to the exclusion of all else, you pigeonhole the only actions that can be taken so the only alternative is to not provide any solutions, and in the process taking the authors work. This acts towards eliminating the social contract through destructive interference, towards not providing the benefits you enjoy under the social contract while you at the same time breaking it. This can't last forever, and while this is a minor example, it speaks to the much greater issue.
There isn't nuance that allows for you to do what you did. Its not a court of law that you can get to argue false justification, its a simple ethical question that includes the authors intent which you exclude, and the license, which you dissemble on.
There are things you can do that can't be forced by society, but the social contract has never been about forcing people. As you say its been about freeing people to act towards the benefit and survival of others.
Part of this is the important choice to know when you should not do something because it breaks that contract and incentivizes destructive outcomes. This is where ethics and reasoning following Method come in. You aren't following Method or Logic here, you follow fallacy.
> If the author truly intends their software to be used a certain way ...
The law is not perfect, and in fact many places the rule of law has failed following similar degradation in reasoning that you follow here, which has become known as judicial activism. I've already said what happens generically, so you've been warned even if you don't see it.
The true nature of evil is in the blindness it induces in self and others so they can adopt evil without resistance. I'm not saying you are evil, but this is a very slippery slope that you don't even realize you are on when you've become blind.
To become blind, you have to make a willful choice to be blind at some point through repeated action, and the nature of perception and your subconscious forces you to ignore anything to the contrary after that, you made the choice to not see, this is a basic psychological bias. Negligence is sufficient to consider intent when there is loss, and the loss here while quite subjective scales over time, having enabled others to undermine the authors' works.
We have many psychological blindspots as members of humanity, which is why in many religions they cover behaviors that help avoid adoption of destructive behaviors through those blindspots, and objective tests to know when (in Christianity a part of this is in the 7 virtues, and 7 sins). This has a lot of nuance that few read into.
Wrath for example is the loss of rationality, flawed reasoning meets that definition as a deadly sin when its to the exclusion of all else (i.e. blind).
Complacency, is sloth, most of the rest are primal desires towards destructive ends. You get the idea.
There are those that may claim to embrace these things but have blinded themselves so they don't know when they break them. You generally can't be good in the long run, if you are blind to the bad you do in the short.
You appear to have no resistance to breaking the contract. This is a perceptual blindness, and it disadvantages you, and it disadvantages those who you might induce to do the same, whether it be as a role-model from proximity or otherwise.
> I'm not going to try and argue about what the author "wants", ..., but is not expressed fully.
The author's intent is expressed to sufficient degree that choices can be made to either follow the authors intent if you use their work, or not. Its not a novel construction, so you can build it yourself on your own and then do whatever you want with that creation, that would be the right path to be ethical about this.
You don't seem to make the right choice here. This discussion is irrespective of the subjective definition of what individuals consider open source is. This is a cop out. The author published their expectations, you either follow them or you don't, and undermining those expectations is on the side of you choosing you don't.
I don't think I've claimed that ignoring the author's request is factually wrong. I'm debating on the internet because I _do_ believe the license makes more allowance than you give credit, but I definitely would not say that what I'm doing here is objectively "in the right". I've reached out to the author as a result of these discussions, because I do, in fact, value what you are referring to and believe I did make some false assumptions about what the author might have intended.
To say that the license doesn't supersede the author's words is your opinion. It does, in fact, supersede the request both in law and "socially".
If any requirement or request need be laid upon the software and its use, there are mechanisms for doing that available today and the author willingly chose to try something new. This doesn't negate their request, but it does bring into question the "social contract"; people have certain social expectations of software, particularly when licensed like this, that you seem to ignore or consider null in this argument, which seems unfair and one-sided.
I do believe that this situation is not as cut and dry and morally wrong as you seem to be stating. What of a user that deploys the project without ever reading that specific page of documentation?
Perhaps you and I are debating towards different end states here. Myself towards what a fleshed-out approach to this kind of permissive-license-plus-social-request open-source might look like and you towards ignoring the request of another human being implying an eventual complete breakdown in society.
It's simply untrue that every request from every human being (regarding something they have made or otherwise) must be respected and followed above all else and to think otherwise trends towards its own breakdown of society. Intent and requests are not the be-all-end-all of ethical cooperation that you seem to be arguing for. Does this imply that anarchy and chaos are the answer? No, of course not! As I have tried to indicate, there is more nuance here than your argument makes room for and indeed the lack of nuance in your own argument as you tighten it down further results in its own ethical problems which you seem to be trying to argue into impossibility.
Alas, we humans on an individual and group level will always have mutually exclusive goals and opinions and working through those is part of the human experience - relationships take communication, work, nuance, understanding, and compromise. Absolutism such as you are calling for is the kind of thing that results in societal collapse as well.
In summary, I agree with you that asking the author is the right thing to do here as I _did_ read the documentation thoroughly and I should have done so and not assumed that my little personal git forge was "exempt" from the request. As a result, I have reached out to discuss as requested. I also would say that anyone else that opts to interpret the license literally would also be in the right, though. I also disagree that this issue is as cut and dry as you make it out to be. I also believe the status quo around "open source plus restrictions" (if you can say there is much of one) can be greatly improved and is a discourse worth having.
This is a very innovative way to earn a living with open source! Make the free version sickeningly cutesy (no offense to the author intended), and charge for the professional-looking version. No change in functionality, just chrome.
Thanks! I'll be sure to post through it either way. My failure condition is going back to work somewhere else, so worst case it'll be more likely to happen :)
Really though my dayjob kinda burns me out because I have to focus on AEO, which is SEO but for AI. I get by making and writing about cool things, but damn does it hurt having to write for machines instead of humans.
When I last looked into it, they are planning a white label service to customize the look and has been requesting folks to not fork and modify the images.
> Regardless, Xe did ask nicely to not change out the images shipped as a whitelabel service is planned in the future
I've soft launched the commercial offering and I'm working on expanding the commercial features before I announce it more publicly. If you pay $50 a month on GitHub sponsors, you get access to BotStopper complete with custom CSS support. You'll also get access to the reputation database I'm working on named hivemind.
>> However, you are allowed to believe what you want and I can't stop you from being wrong.
>For instance, you appear to believe that I'm attacking you?
FWIW, that's not what I read. You made an assumption about implementation and the effects based on very little information. Xe simply said you can believe (i.e., make assumptions about) whatever you want. You then assumed (another one) that your comment was interpreted as an attack.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. There's not enough context in here to know either way.
I'd be happy to talk about it if it existed, I'm still working out the details. But the basic idea is to take advantage of the fact that Anubis is a very popular project from what I've seen with logs that server admin have submitted the same IP blocks and the like hit instances of Anubis so some kind of IP reputation thing would work for this.
I am also working on some noJS checks, but I want to test them with paid customers in order to let a thousand flowers bloom.
Cool. Good luck on both that and Anubis generally — seems like you’ve found something that’s both a meaningful benefit to the common good AND could maybe make a buncha money, or at least enough to pay for development, which is awesome.
Thanks! There's a lot of really hard problems to solve and most of them hinge around trust. I usually default into solving trust by making things open, but security software needs a bit of cloak and dagger by necessity. I'll find a balance I'm sure, but it's an annoying thing to balance.
That’s the beautiful thing about open source, they ask but do not demand.
Of course, if you use this service for your enterprise, the Right Thing To Do would be support the excellent project financially, but this is by no means required.
If you want to use this project on your site and don’t like the logo, you are free to change it. If the site is personal and this project is not something you would spend money on, I don’t even think it is unethical to change the image.
Seems pretty unethical to me. Exercising a liberty in direct contradiction to its creator’s wishes for personal gain with no recompense to them is about as crassly selfish and non-prosocial as it gets. Perhaps your ethics don’t include “being prosocial towards those whose work benefits you”? That’s the usual difference I encounter between my ethics and those who disagree that it’s crass — and I do respect such differing beliefs.
Note that I’m not faulting you for behaving this way, no insult or disparagement intended, etc.! Open source inherited this dissonance between giving it all away to anyone who asks for free, and giving nothing of yours back in return because prosocial is not an ethical standard, from its predecessor belief system. It remains unsolved decades later, in both open source and libertarianism, and I certainly don’t hold generic exploiters of the prosocial-imbalance defect accountable for the underlying flaw in both belief systems.
If the authors wanted to disallow people to be free (as in freedom) to change the source code for free (as in beer), then the authors had every chance to publish the source code under a more restrictive license.
I’m trying to imagine how this might be unethical. The only scenario I can think of is if the authors wanted the code to not be modified in certain ways, but felt based on more deeply held principles that the code should be made FOSS. But I struggle to see how both ideas could exist simultaneously - if you think code should be free then you think there is no ethical issue with people modifying it to fit their use.
If you believe in giving away code because that’s open-source prosocial, then open-source adherents will claim that taking advantage of you is ethical, because if you didn’t want to be exploited, you shouldn’t have been open-source prosocial in the first place. And by treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful, exploiters place pressures on prosocial maintainers into adopting open source licenses, even though they’ll then be exploited by people who don’t care about being prosocial, eventually burning out the maintainer who either silent-quits or rage-quits.
Of course, if OSI signed off on “if you get rich from my source code you have to share some of that wealth back to me” as a permissible form of clause in open source licensing, that would of course break the maintainer burnout cycle — but I’m certainly not holding my breath.
> treating “pay me if you get paid for my code” licenses as treated as evil and shameful
Blatantly untrue. Companies riding the coattails of the opensource moniker for PR points while using restrictive licenses is what garners all the hate. It's essentially fraud committed to garner good press.
The other thing that gets people riled up is companies with a CLA that they claim is for responsible stewardship suddenly pulling a fast one and relicensing the project to a non-OSI license. It's perfectly legal but it tends to upset people.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with source available software at any level of restriction. Just be very clear about what it is and isn't.
The license explicitly allows you to make such changes. They could have picked a different license, but didn't.
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software
> They could have picked a different license, but didn’t.
I disagree.
Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts — claiming that to restrict in any way the liberty of another person to exploit one’s work is unethical. Human beings are social creatures, and most human beings are not asocial with decoupled ethical systems like myself; so, given the social pressures in play, few human beings truly have the liberty to pick another license and endure the shame and vitriol that exercising that freedom earns from us.
I don't think its fully correct that social pressure means that permissive licenses are no longer meaningful when it comes to the ethics or sociology of open source software.
Since the original subject is also about swapping out the imagery, it's also difficult to take your argument too seriously as the term "exploit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for your argument.
I will also add that the social and ethical component goes both ways: is it ethical to knowingly give something away freely and without restriction and then immediately attempt to impose restrictions through a purely social mechanism? I would say so as long as your expectation is that some might politely decline.
Or worse, some may respond with the same vitriol and then we're at your original point, which doesn't seem to be preventing such an approach here, making me doubt your hypothesis.
> Licenses that prohibit exploitation of source code for personal reward are treated with hostility, shame, and boycotts
I'd have to disagree. However let's just run with it because your subsequent reasoning doesn't seem consistent to me.
If you do A you'll be met with hostility. So instead you do B, but then you add a request "actually please abide by A" and somehow this is supposed to not be met with hostility? You can't have it both ways. B but with an addendum that makes it A is just A wearing a mask. Changing the name doesn't change the thing.
You are presuming this is their primary concern. Releasing software with a permissive license is a pretty strong signal you are ok with people not doing exactly as you ask.
It’s certainly a legal signal, insofar as once you have that signal, you have the ability to make a legally-sound decision on usage — but I don’t presume that it’s in any way an indication of how strongly the author is or isn’t invested in whatever license they chose. Unless accompanied by something written by the maintainer, the only certain statement is that the maintainer released with a metadata attribute set to a value; nothing more.
The purpose of a software license is to codify the rights the author grants to its users. The author can't claim to use a free software license, while also making separate demands about how the software can be used. These demands should either be part of the license, or removed altogether. This moral shaming for breaking a "social contract" is ridiculous. The software is either free or not. You can't have it both ways.
“Don’t use this for evil” is a legal and valid software license. This is anathema to programmers and law-as-code adherents, but it’s perfectly acceptable to bring to a court of law in a licensing dispute. Different courts and different acts of accused evil will result in different judgments. It would be very difficult for a corporation to accept that license; it would be very simple for an individual to do so.
Such a license does not comply with your requirements; yet, it is also valid under case law, even if it is statistically unlikely to permit enforcement against most claimed evils. Each society has certain evils that are widely accepted by the courts, so it certainly isn’t a get out of all possible jails free card.
The purpose of a license is to inform of the rights available. The user is responsible for evaluating the license, or for trusting the judgment of a third party if they are uninterested in evaluating themselves.
If the author’s entire license “This is free software for free uses, please contact me for a paid license for paid uses” then that is statistically likely to be court enforceable against exploitation, so long as the terms offered are reasonable to the judge and any expert witnesses called. The Free Software Foundation does not have exclusive rights to the words “free software”. Adoption will be much reduced for someone who writes such a license, of course, and perhaps someone will exploit a loophole that a lengthier outsourced license would have covered. Neither of those outcomes are necessarily worth the time and effort to try and prevent, especially when use of any open source license guarantees the right of exploitation for unshared profit in plain language versus the homegrown one which does not.
This is not a legal matter, nor is it related to the FSF and any of the "open source" licenses. My argument is philosophical.
Using a license that allows the software to be distributed and modified, while placing restrictions or exemptions to those permissions outside of the license, at the very least sends mixed signals. My point is that if the author wants to make those restrictions, that's fine, but the license is the correct place for it. What's shitty from my moral perspective is using a commonly accepted free software license for marketing purposes, but then judging people for not following some arbitrary demands. If anything, _that_ is the unethical behavior.
I completely agree with you. I just want to point out that the actual software author here is not being aggressive about it. They make a request and that's it. Nor are the other 55 contributors visible on github.
"we ask (but not demand, these are words on the internet, not word of law) that you not remove the Anubis character from your deployment"
For whatever reason somebody decided to blow it out of proportion here on hn.
Well, sure, but the author is also labeling people who don't comply with their request as "cowards" in this very thread. So by the same token that they kindly make a request, they can also refrain from passing judgment on people who kindly don't comply. And the same goes for people who pass their judgment on the author's behalf, or make a point about some "social contract".
> Seems pretty unethical to me. Exercising a liberty in direct contradiction to its creator’s wishes for personal gain with no recompense to them is about as crassly selfish and non-prosocial as it gets.
You're ignoring the possibility that users of the software might not agree with the author's wishes. There's nothing unethical about that.
A request to not change a part of the software is the same as a request to not use the software in specific industries, or for a specific purpose. There are many projects that latch on open source for brand recognition, but then "forbid" the software to be used in certain countries, by military agencies, etc. If the author wants to restrict how the software can be used, then it's not libre software.
I disagree. Having the freedom to choose to ignore someone’s wishes does not necessarily make it ethical to exercise that freedom. Ethics are not as simple as “what is not prohibited is therefore ethical”.
Ethics is also not as simple as "the author's wishes are always to be respected". For instance, free software was built on the ethical principle that restrictions on users' four fundamental freedoms (whether that be legal, technical, or in this case social), by IP holders, are unethical. This justifies piracy, and definitely justifies breaking this request.
I don't believe it is possible to reconcile these ethical views, as a ethical subjectivist.
I think there might be cases where the ethical thing to do would be to respect an author's non-binding request. However the request in this case seems directly contradictory to the principles of open source software and thus I can't bring myself to see it as legitimate.
Edit to add, an example of a non-contradictory request might be to contribute monetarily in proportion to the financial benefit you derive. It's an additional non-binding request to help sustain the community which seems reasonably consistent with the ethos of opensource to me.
The issue is that opensource is a movement that comes with a set of values attached. The licenses aren't impersonal the way the copyright system at large is.
Removing some stupid cartoon character is hardly a huge ethical violation, despite their wishes.
Sure, you can say it’s unethical in that it directly contravenes their request - I won’t argue that - but it’s the smallest of violations.
As far as I can see it’s MIT licensed so you have no legal obligation otherwise. If they truly cared about people keeping the character, they should have made the request with teeth.
I don’t even understand why they made the request in the first place. The nature of the request makes it seem as though it isn’t actually important at all, so why make the request at all? It just puts everyone else in an uncomfortable position. If keeping the character is important, then why release it under MIT license?
I'm seeing this sentiment multiple times on this thread - "fine, it's legal, but it's still wrong!"
That's an extremely disrespectful take on someone adhering to a contract that both parties agreed to. You are using shaming language to pressure people into following your own belief system.
In this specific instance, the author could have chosen any damn license they wanted to. They didn't. They chose one to get the most adoption.
You appear to want both:
1. Widespread adoption
and
2. Restrict what others can do.
The MIT license is not compatible with #2 above. You can ask nicely, but if you don't get what you want you don't get to jump on a fucking high horse and religiously judge others using your own belief system.
Author should have used GPL (so any replaced images get upstreamed back and thus he has control) OR some other proprietary license that prevents modifications like changing the image.
A bunch of finger-pointers gabbing on forums about those "evil" people who stick to both the word and the spirit of the license are nothing more than the modern day equivalent of witch-hunters using "intent" to secure a prosecution.
Be better than that - don't join the mob in pointing out witches. We don't need more puritans.
> In this case upstreaming replaced images wouldn't be useful to the author anyway, they are going to keep the anime image.
In this case, it would be, because (presumably) the new images are the property of the user, and they would hardly want (for example) their company logo to be accidentally GPL'ed.
I do not agree with your position that two parties who enter into a contract are no longer subject to ethical judgment by others. Contract law does not invalidate ethics, no matter how appealing it is to opt out of them. As one of the asocial / decoupled people who has no social compulsion whatsoever, I voluntarily opt-in to preferring prosocial outcomes and typically deem anti-prosocial actions unethical even if our society currently accepts them.
For example, if an employee does something hostile towards society at their employer when they have the freedom to choose not to do so — and since employment is at will, they always have that freedom to choose — I will tend to judge their antisocial actions unethical, even if their contract allows it. (This doesn’t mean I will therefore judge the person as unethical! One instance does not a pattern make, etc.)
So, for me, ethical judgments are not opt-out under any circumstance, nor can they be abrogated by contract or employment or law. I hold this is a non-negotiable position, so I will withdraw here; you’re welcome to continue persuading others if you wish.
> Contract law does not invalidate ethics, no matter how appealing it is to opt out of ethics
I didn't claim it does, I am claiming that since ethics is subjective and the contract is not, you subjecting your moral standard to others is no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch.
Now, you may not have a problem publicly judging others, but your actions are barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church.
IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you.
You're using some really emotional language about what is really not such a huge issue. Maybe it's time to go offline for a while?
"no different than a mob subjecting an old woman to accusations of being a witch."
Well, you're not being driven out of your village or being executed...
Also the person you're replying to has beeing rather polite. Hardly a witch hunt is it?
"barely different from those of the Westboro Baptist Church"
The church that interrupts the grieving of the families of dead soldiers to shout about how much they hate gay people? You seriously believe that the person you're repling to is "barely different" from that?
"IOW, sure, you are allowed to publicly condemn people who hold different moral beliefs to you, but the optics are not good for you."
You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now, while being much more accusatory about it, comparing them to some really vile people. I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
Why are you so offended that someone might judge you for ignoring the friendly request of someone giving you something for free?
You seem to be making the argument that someone who uses shaming language to impose their ideological/religious is should not be responded to in kind.
I obviously disagree; smearing a veneer of civility over thought-policing does not make that thought policing any more acceptable.
> You're literally condeming them for having different moral beliefs than you right now,
You also appear to be claiming that, when being policed by puritans, one should politely put up with it. I also disagree - I don't think puritanical holier-than-thou comments deserve more civility than they give.
> I wonder how you feel the optics of this reflects on you, because I don't think it's good for you.
People pointing out thought-policing always look good ;-)
The ones who are crusading for it tend to look bad. I'm not too worried.
The author's quite reasonable and polite request to not change the appearance of the project is pretty straightforward so morally no, it cannot. Feel free to write your own version though. I hope I helped.
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