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[None]

I'm two out of potentially four interviews through a job applications, plus a questionnaire about how I'd react to certain situations, all for a remote customer support role. It's not even particularly highly technical.

Finding work really is full time work, and it takes weeks to process through one company if it gets anywhere.

[EuchreJack]

My WTF has to be that people are apparently playing Mafia in the WTF thread while the actual mafia sub-forum is actively recruiting.

But I'm sure nobody here could handle a real game of mafia. Total n00b amateur hour here...

[methylatedspirit]

I couldn't. Look at me, do I look like I could ever play Mafia? I agree too much. I'd reveal everything on the first day the moment anyone has the slightest hint of doubt about me.


Jesus Christ, the Free Music Archive has a lot of music with 'dealbreaker' licenses. Since my article is under CC-BY, I can only legally use CC-BY and public domain material. But even then, you see NonCommercial and NoDerivatives clauses that are simply useless for people like me. "Non-commercial" is a touchy subject, so I'm not even touching that, and NoDerivatives is not how I work. The whole damn point of my work is to make derivatives.

Also, small rant/PSA: Non-commercial clauses are not open-source. They restrict the freedoms given to the end-user, which is antithetical to the damn point of open-source. It says to people, "I reserve the exclusive rights to make money off this work.". No company could make profits off open-source software (Wordpress, Red Hat, Linaro...) if this was the case. If I solicit donations to write articles/manuals with material with NC clauses in them, is that a commercial use? It's too fuzzy and risky. If you wanna contribute to an open ecosystem, and have others use it freely, do it right. Don't use non-commercial clauses in your work.

[EuchreJack]

I couldn't. Look at me, do I look like I could ever play Mafia? I agree too much. I'd reveal everything on the first day the moment anyone has the slightest hint of doubt about me.

Which is why you should play.  Learn to lie either by doing or by watching others, or at least detect lying in others.  Plus mafia needs sheep (players that agree and don't think too much).
Look at my play, its basically what you're describing.  Still won a couple games.

[Maximum Spin]

My take is that, if you're not putting things in the public domain, they're not really "free" or "open". People just feel this ridiculous need to control what they've made, it's insane.

[EuchreJack]

My take is that, if you're not putting things in the public domain, they're not really "free" or "open". People just feel this ridiculous need to control what they've made, it's insane.

My parents are alright, but some parallels exist.


....

With over 600 viewers and about 30 active users, I'm starting to feel like a performer on a stage.  Enjoy the show!

[methylatedspirit]

My take is that, if you're not putting things in the public domain, they're not really "free" or "open". People just feel this ridiculous need to control what they've made, it's insane.

Attribution clauses are nothing. Depends on the license, but you more-or-less just say what it's called, who made it, and maybe a copy of the license (oh, and a link to it, if applicable). I don't care, that's easy as hell for me. My work ain't 100% original. No-one's is.

Share-alike and "you must publish source code"... that's entering into FSF and GNU shit. That's copyleft, using copyright against itself to force stuff to remain available under the same license and therefore "open" regardless of what happens. I fully get it, but I don't prefer it myself. There's a whole ethical dilemma about companies like Intel taking Minix (licensed under BSD, a "permissive" license) and turning it into spooky shit like Intel ME. Like, are you indirectly responsible for the surveillance of possibly millions of people because you wrote the original OS it was based on? I'll just hope that I don't write anything that important in my life.

(There's a small subclause that I "allow" that I call "sue for patents, lose your rights (to it)". That's a gotcha for patent trolls.)

Anything more restrictive can go die in a fire.

[Maximum Spin]

There's a whole ethical dilemma about companies like Intel taking Minix (licensed under BSD, a "permissive" license) and turning it into spooky shit like Intel ME. Like, are you indirectly responsible for the surveillance of possibly millions of people because you wrote the original OS it was based on?

Like most ethical dilemmas, this just seems really stupid to me.
"No." The answer is "no".

[methylatedspirit]

I don't enjoy arguing, but Andrew Tanenbaum had a choice, when re-licensing Minix, to go with GPL or some other copyleft license.

GPL won't stop bad people from doing bad things, but the thing with that is that you have to show your modified source code in unobfuscated form and with full access (to all paying customers, at least). It keeps companies honest. Intel can't pull this off with the Linux kernel for Intel ME, because they'd have to publish its full source code. Everyone who understood the code would realize that Intel's doing some shady shit.

In contrast, Minix, by being permissively-licensed, doesn't have this "restriction". Intel modified Minix for Intel ME because they don't have to publish any source code of their own. At least, that's what I'd do if I had something to hide. Intel happily contributes to Linux regularly, why not open-source Intel ME, right? Good security can exist in open-source; look at all the perfectly-good open-source cryptography libraries out there. That they're not is a deafening silence. Apple uses the BSD system (it's not just a kernel), not Linux, because they don't have to do that whole "publish source code" thing, and look at how locked-down their shit is.

I'm on the fence between permissive and copyleft for this reason. Every contributor to Minix has blood on their hands because of Intel, depending on how far the chain of blood applies. They all played a hand in it. Would you want to be Einstein, having discovered that your life's work played a part in the nuking of Japan in WW2?

I dunno, it's just my personal morality. I don't want to be responsible for bad things, no matter how dilute that responsibility is. I suppose you could say that I'm indirectly responsible for a lot of bad things, by that logic. It's not rational, I will admit.

[Maximum Spin]

Since you don't enjoy arguing, let me summarise my position as well and then we can just leave it at that. I can do so as easily as this:

GPL won't stop bad people from doing bad things,

That's not anybody's responsibility in the first place. Worrying about what somebody else might do with something you made (especially if it's as perfectly interchangeable as an operating system!) is just dumb, and Edward Teller should have a completely clear conscience, much less Einstein.

(You know Einstein explicitly endorsed the development of the atomic bomb because of that whole "Nazis" thing, right? While he later said that he wouldn't have done so if he had known just how far behind the Germans really were on the subject, he could not have known that at the time so his decision was perfectly reasonable.)

[methylatedspirit]

Sometimes I worry about things that are firmly out of my control, and this is one of them, now that you've laid it out. Like, it's one thing if I worked for Intel on the Management Engine, but it's a whole different ballpark if I contributed to Minix, and Intel just so happened to use Minix for that project. I wouldn't feel right after that, but I don't work for Intel. They're not me. In that scenario, I didn't contribute to Minix for the express purpose of having Intel use it, did I?

I guess it appeals to some nebulous form of "justice" that I have in me. That it worries about things outside of my control seems to hint to something deeper.

[scriver]

I couldn't. Look at me, do I look like I could ever play Mafia? I agree too much. I'd reveal everything on the first day the moment anyone has the slightest hint of doubt about me.

I've only been in one Mafio and I nearly cried

I am not built for conflict

[delphonso]

I dunno, if I invented a program to recognize dogs and then someone made a machine that walked around and kicked dogs, I'd feel bad because I contributed to that. Certainly, I would feel worse about that than I would feel good about if 20 people made 20 machines that pet dogs and gave them food. But I think that is just some level of sensitivity and fear of making the world worse in any way.

But I suppose this is the risk of creativity, particularly in technology - coding is extremely collaborative, after all.

[methylatedspirit]

Good ol' "this is why we can't have nice things". Once you publish a work (and especially if you make it free to use), you forfeit the ability to have people not do undesirable things with your work. Copyright, moral rights, those don't do shit here. Not even Nintendo can stop porn of their characters from being made. There is no limit to Rule 34, in that case.

[ChairmanPoo]

Larry Niven tried and failed 🤣