this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2024
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Yes. If FOSS projects bend the knee to shitty laws just because “they are the law”, then FOSS is free labor for corporations with no gains for the people.
That's the point of FOSS as copyleft, to use the law to protect "free and open" information. This allows bigger projects, because contributors don't have to keep their heads down.
At the same time maybe this is a downside, not an upside. As the reason why it has all gotten so big and complex and corporate-influenced.
It really is. Relying on a government good will to protect people best interests may be the point of failure of FOSS. I hope not but I’m less and less optimistic about the future
The usual consequences to not following the law are not in your favor.
If your goal in contributing to FOSS is to go to prison, there are a lot better avenues to achieve that.
Law aren’t always right and governments don’t always do the best neither for the world nor for its citizens. Open source projects and corporations shouldn’t rely on any government, they shouldn’t do the biddings on governments — either “good” or “bad” — and act in people best interests.
Of course this is a pipe dream and what we got is more free work for companies with none the benefits
I don't understand why you think "avoiding prison" equals free work for companies. The individuals contributing to open source are subject to the same laws we're discussing in this thread, and are the ones that would actually be getting consequences.
No one exists without a government, and that's not even a pipe dream, it'd be societal collapse.
Because FOSS stands for both free software and people’s freedom. No one exists without a government except for external forces that are stronger than the government itself (lobbying is a way to strong arm a government), but this is another matter entirely.
FOSS organisations should exist outside a government because governments are easily corruptible, which is has happened again and again throughout history and is slowly happening right now. And obeying the law not to be thrown in jail is a nice argument, yes, and a shitty one at that: imagine how good would be a German citizen to abide to the government rule during the Nazi period. This doesn’t mean either that they shouldn’t follow any laws, but that, much like any international organisation, they should be international laws agreed on by multiple nations.
Which is essentially the crux of the matter: as long as FOSS projects work within the framework of a government (the US), the project can be easily hijacked, turned into something that goes against people interests. What are the people interests? In short, the minimum denominator is equality, freedom to speak, a right to privacy.
If FOSS projects do have to follow a government’s laws, then contributing to one is free work for corporations: laws can be changed and a democratic society can turn into a non-democratic entity, with laws that restrict the freedom of its citizens; in EU they try to pass a “chat control” law to make cryptography useless [by adding a back door] and while I believe it won’t pass no doubt it’s a worrisome sign. At the end of the day who would benefit the most from FOSS but companies, which do so already?
And to reiterate: sometime it’s better to be thrown in prison than to send someone else to their death
Which corporation are you talking about here?
America™
Nearly every single corporation with an online presence uses free software from the foss community.