Software developer, intermittent indie game dev, formerly u/captainbland on reddit. Also kind of interested in medical imaging etc.

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Cake day: February 5th, 2025

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  • CapriciousDay@lemmy.mlOPtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlParadox of tolerance license
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    9 hours ago

    Strictly speaking these all do something similar-ish at face value but actually quite different in terms of mechanism and target. I think the unpopularity of a lot of these licensing structures is also down to lack of legal verification in a lot of cases.

    The illegality possibility does warrant careful consideration, but I suspect in many cases regimes which would oppose this kind of license would be making the use and enforcement of software fairly selective in any case. If it is made illegal, it’s made illegal by the respective government, not the software author or license writer.

    A question is then raised as to what degree the implied open source requirement that open source should be leveraged by e.g. Nazis actually benefits developers and users. Or whether it is in effect a kind of appeasement as no doubt use which contradicts those values (and hence promotes freedom) is illegal already. Those uses which are orthogonal to that aim may be selectively targeted for arbitrary reasons such as the identity of the user.


  • Strictly speaking I think such provisions would be unenforceable in those circumstances anyway so doesn’t the effect kind of cancel out? Don’t get me wrong I get where you’re coming from but why would we imagine such a license has an effect in nations that are already hostile to those ideas and probably have broken judicial systems anyway?




  • Yep, it makes sense when you consider the real nature of management and why it actually exists.

    A rich man starts a company. He hires 12 people under him. He’s working a bit harder than he’d hoped, he’s constantly fielding questions and such but all is well. He needs to hire two more people. This is too many for him to manage directly, so he appoints two people to manage the other twelve as two teams of 6. All is well again.

    They expand up to 30 people and suddenly they find the two managers are too stretched again! So another manager has to be introduced. When the company is over about 150 people, we even need multiple layers of management to keep this whole thing afloat as suddenly there are too many managers reporting to the founder or to the managers.

    Yet at no point does the person who owns the company agree to give up any real control. If someone sets a budget he doesn’t like, he gives that control of the budget to someone else. Everyone in that hierarchy is acting on behalf of the owners under this arrangement.

    The managers are just sat there with the mandate to make employees do more work under ever-increasing resource constraints, in the name of profit maximisation.

    The management hierarchy functions as little more than a way of getting the owner’s instructions down to the employees by people who can interpret them as such, and to feed issues back to whatever level has the ability to deal with them (or declare them not an issue, as is often the case).