• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Personally, I’ve yet to see a single American successfully use guns to protect any other constitutional right from government infringement.

    The Battle of Athens is probably the most uniquely clear-cut example of what you’re asking for, unless we count the American Revolutionary War itself.

    Other successful examples mostly involve activists using non-violent protest to push for change, while using firearms to protect themselves from violent reactionaries that would otherwise murder them. Notably, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s. For a modern example, there’s various “John Brown Gun Clubs” and other community defense organizations providing security at LGBTQ events against fascist groups that seek to terrorize event-goers.

    It’s also worth noting that resistance is often worthwhile even if it doesn’t result in unqualified victory. For example, the Black Panthers’ armed cop-watching activities saved a lot of Black folks from brutal beatings at the hands of the police, even if the organization was eventually crushed by the federal government.

    I have seen lots of examples like Waco and Ruby Ridge, where the government should have tried harder to deescalate, but in the end, everyone died. The closest example I can think of where the government did backoff was the Bundy standoff and all those guys were “defending” was their ability to let their cattle graze illegally on federal land because they didn’t want to pay for access like everyone else.

    It sounds like you might be in a bit of a filter-bubble. I don’t mean any offense by this, it’s a normal thing that tends to happen to people. If the news sources you read and the people you talk to don’t mention these things because it doesn’t mesh with their worldview, how would you hear about them?







  • There is a clause about redistribution (1), and it expressly specifies that it applies to “aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources”, not single, standalone works.

    That is a weird way of wording it. In practice I doubt there are any OSI-approved licenses that prohibit standalone commercial distribution. If there were, you could trivially comply by just including a “hello world” program to make it an aggregate distribution.












  • The goal of the copyleft movement (which overlaps heavily with the free software movement) is to carve out an intellectual commons that can’t be re-enclosed. This commons is important for a number of reasons, including that it tends to be better for end-users of software in the sense that anti-features can’t really gain a foothold. It does not automatically solve UX issues, nor does it stop people from using the knowledge of the commons to do bad things.

    Much of the strength of the intellectual commons is that it builds on itself, instead of having to re-invent the same things in a dozen or more different proprietary endeavors. If we were to start a “peace software” movement, it would be incompatible with the commons, due to the restrictions it imposes. Peace software can’t build on copyleft software, and none of the commons can build on peace software. These sorts of things were considered, and compatibility was deemed more important than pushing more specific values. This isn’t a matter of the FSF or OSI standing in the way, it’s just that “peace software” would have to go it alone.

    Due to this dynamic, those that want to build “anticapitalist software” would be better served by using the GNU AGPL, rather than a license that restricts commercial use. The AGPL fixes the loophole that the GPL leaves open for network services, and should allow us to carve out a new noncommercial online ecosystem. It should even be used for non-network code, as that code may be repurposed or built upon by network services. I’m glad to see lemmy, kbin, and mastodon using it.