Sometimes, doing something is worse than doing nothing at all.
> For that matter, using licensing to restrict government abuse obviously isn’t going to work, because licensing relies on state enforcement of rights anyway. If the state itself is compromised, having a clever little license isn’t the failsafe the OES thinks it is. It’s really just asking the police to arrest ICE with extra steps. This isn’t hypothetical, this is already codified in the law: even the international treaties that govern copyright have explicit exemptions for government action related to security interests. A license like this one can only ever possibly do harm.
> It is worse than ineffective; it is wrong too, because software developers should not exercise such power over what users do. Imagine selling pens with conditions about what you can write with them; that would be noisome, and we should not stand for it. Likewise for general software. If you make something that is generally useful, like a pen, people will use it to write all sorts of things, even horrible things such as orders to torture a dissident; but you must not have the power to control people's activities through their pens. It is the same for a text editor, compiler or kernel.
Lol. I would like a pen that could not be used to torture a dissident through any means. We have no way to build such a pen, but if we could, I would like it. I agree I don't want Meta or Google making pens that don't let me do things Meta or Google doesn't approve of. But indie dev restricts against war and gambling with their pens is hardly the same thing. Context matters in this case. The difference between resistance and oppression comes down to context, in this case.
To go a step further. DRM is the bad kind of this, and it exists and is used by corporations to restrict freedom. You can't use an indie devs code for war or gambling is the good kind of this. More that and less corporate DRM, please.
