Should open source sniff the geopolitical wind and ban itself in China and Russia?

In 2022, information technology collided with geopolitics like never before. After Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, many nations decided that Vladimir Putin's regime and populace should be denied access to technology and even to services from the companies that make and wield it. The USA, meanwhile, extended its …

[Anonymous Coward]

The hypothetical seems silly to me.

If China manages to do both of those things it would be due to a huge amount of focussed and iterative innovation within a closed loop in China that will already have been well under way for many years.

If we suspend disbelief and ponder that that might be on the verge of being announced then availability of FOSS would only have been a small part of that many years-long process.

The other two parts being:

- a stable, focussed and well-funded ecosystem of primary research which has been a key strength of China for years but which of late has been sorely disrupted by China’s increasingly autocratic internal policies under the excuse of Covid

-strong international flow of the materials and skills required to manufacture and deploy the foundational technology at scale which sanctions have been effective in targeting.

Trying to limit the spread of FOSS would almost certainly create an environment in which the incentives to contribute fall away entirely (would you work for free on a software project if you might be subject to a Mcarthyite witch hunt for your troubles?).

The big winners would be Microsoft, Oracle etc. the big loser would be the speed of innovation in the western world which in all probability would chip away at a key benefit of western world (relative) openness over the Chinese system and gradually achieve the opposite of the planned outcome.

[martinusher]

>which of late has been sorely disrupted by China’s increasingly autocratic internal policies under the excuse of Covid

Newsflash! Those policies have been rescinded. But we have to keep the 'autocratic' meme running so we'll dig up something else.

Its not Chinese autocracy that we need to be concerned about but Chinese nationalism. Before we in the US went all Cold War 2 on them -- dragging our 'partners' (vassals) along with us -- the Chinese were doing a great job of being global citizens. In fact they were beating us at our own game of 'freewheeling capitalism and unlimited enterprise'. So we had to bring them down a peg or two to protect our industrial birthright.

The other thing we should bear in mind is that these other countries also contribute to FOSS.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Covid policies were immediately and haphazardly rescinded in the face of an unexpected burst of public demonstration (which they also violently suppressed).

The creeping centralisation of power and gradually increasing repression of public freedom and innovation under Xi Jinping are pretty well documented (and not only by hawkish western sources). If you think that trend has suddenly reversed just because they ended the Covid lockdown to avoid losing control of the population then you’re more of an optimist than I.

Your concern on Chinese nationalism is valid, though. If I’m right that the deliberate suppression of the economic openness and vibrancy which has supported China’s spectacular standard of living increases will slow them down then the government will look to blame external sources and nationalism will naturally continue to rise.

[steviebuk]

They aren't an optimist, they are a wumao.

[abetancort]

You are probably right. If you see who you view as your enemy get rich, you start to worry and try to sabotage his growth anyway you can’t. That was probably what happened to the US during the last decade, it started to worry China was going to displace the US as the biggest economy in the world and that got a few people in US’s establishment very worried and afraid.

[Sanguma]

Led by the only businessman with the sheeer skill to drive not one but three casinos into bankruptcy. It takes real skill to drive a casino into bankruptcy, considering that everybody bets against it, it holds the bank, and the laws of probability and statistics aren't in your average bettor's favour.

[Orv]

Eh, easier than you'd think. Casinos are spectacularly labor-intensive and face lots of competition in most places they're legal.

I'm not saying Trump isn't a bad businessman, I'm just saying "he ran an unsuccessful casino" isn't the dunk people think it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

unsuccessfully casino or wound up a successful money laundry ?

"The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement."

[Jonathan Richards 1]

Reversal

> If you see who you view as your enemy get rich

Or maybe, If you see [another nation] gets rich [faster than you?], then you view them as your enemy.

Just a thought.

[Anonymous Coward]

> the Chinese were doing a great job of being global citizens. In fact they were beating us at our own game of 'freewheeling capitalism and unlimited enterprise'. So we had to bring them down a peg or two

What's has been diving China "down a peg or two" recently has been Xi Jinping's rule. Since he came to power, the "freewheeling capitalism and unlimited enterprise" (which has in practise always been subservient to and controlled by the CCP and its members) has been heavily restrained, centrally controlled, and made even more hostile to foreign investors.

Or maybe by "freewheeling capitalism and unlimited enterprise", you just meant "lacking any effective safely, health, labour, or environmental controls"? In which case, I'd agree.

As for being great global citizens, it wasn't the US or the West that told CCP diplomats to act like butt-hurt children ("Wolf Warrior diplomacy"), or instruct the Chinese state-run media to emit a constant stream of lies, xenophobia and hate towards the outside world, or tacitly allow their fishing fleets to illegally strip-mine other nations' waters, or build more new coal-fired power plants than all other nations combined. It is Xi Jinping's choice for China not to be a great global citizen any more.

[martinusher]

This deteriorates into a "He said / she said" situation. We claim that we're just reacting to 'them' and we're all innocent but I'd beg to differ. I've been following this situation closely for years and I can pretty much put my finger on who in the US is primarily responsible for stirring the pot --- because we have form, and not just with China.

What you're seeing with what you term 'wolf warrior diplomacy' is an assertiveness, a collective 'No' to the west. We tend to behave like abusers to countries that don't toe our line and for many smaller countries have lacked the power to get us to stop. China has been a bit like that while its been developing but I reckon it now thinks its big enough to tell us to our face to stop. We would be wise to take the hint.

(Incidentally, since this is a UK based site, is anyone prepared to tell me that the UK is a democracy? Seriously? Democracy died for me the day that the government forcibly shut down the London County Council and replaced it by its hand picked 'councillors'. Or the day that my city's water system was expropriated and sold off to private interests. Most of you won't know what I'm talking about, of course....)

[Lil Endian]

The UK is a democracy!

Likewise, slugs are homeless snails, egg shells are poisonous, and the moon landings were faked.

Oh yeah, of course I'll call you in the morning.

[Geez Money]

So... China isn't an autocracy? I can't even begin to find the start of a point here.

[doublelayer]

The hypothetical is entirely ridiculous; just because their processor is RISC-V and their operating system is Linux won't do a thing for their missile's ability to bypass defense systems. That would be in the design of the missile and any evasion systems built into it, and I have not seen any open source hide-your-missile-from-radar codebases out there.

Let's say that China needs a massively fast chip for something. They could build their own from an open source starting point, but equally they could just copy a design from ARM, AMD, or anyone else they want. They don't do that now because they lack the capacity to manufacture it and because they can't sell it for a profit, which is why they're focusing on manufacturing more than design. If they wanted it for their own use, removing the profit motive, they could do a lot of things whether the design was freely licensed or not, ignoring all legalities with impunity.

[abetancort]

That is what Chinese economic central planning is trying to do. Most of their efforts in defense won’t see the public light, if they need to manufacture anything they will try to do it and probably succeed at it. Will you know it, in the short term you probably won’t.

[veti]

One technology where China has an acknowledged and disturbing lead is in hypersonic missiles, which make no attempt to evade detection, but are practically impossible to intercept in the same way as a bullet from a gun - because it's moving way faster than anything you might try to use to do the job.

In theory, of course, it might be interceptable, in the same way as a bullet can theoretically be deflected by hitting it with another bullet. Good luck with that.

[Justthefacts]

Easier examples

Assume Putin decides to build a face recognition database, because “Ukrainian infiltrators”, and send those recognised to death camps. Russia bases the software in the place most students would start, which is OpenCV libraries for feature-detection primitives.

Are the OpenCV authors guilty of anything? We can debate the ethics endlessly, and I’m probably not interested in doing so if you don’t know the answer. But the legal position in both UK law, and international law established in The Hague, is clear: yes the original author would be guilty of war crimes. Secretaries in the typing pool at the camps are still culpable. That’s it. That’s the law, including in the EU.

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

Another example: Russian tanks must have an electrical command bus, in the West it would be MIL STD 1553 but I guess Russia different. Let’s say they get short of parts, and turn to cannibalising automotive components that use CAN bus. So they need a software stack to drive that, and use OpenCAN. Are the authors of OpenCAN guilty of anything? Again, the legal answer is very simple. Yes, they would be guilty of sanctions-busting and subject to life imprisonment.

If the license had explicitly *chosen* itself to be under ITAR, the author would be off the hook because they could say Russia using it was against license outside their will. But that would draw the anger of EU and other OSS advocates. So it was a *choice* freely taken by the author. The authors chose a course where they got Lots of Praise, and assessed their own probability of going to jail for sanctions-busting as low. A purely self-interested decision, when times were good.

And now the OpenCV and CANOpen authors face a situation they chose to put themselves (and their victims) in, but no longer control the circumstances of whether they get consequences occur. And maybe with hindsight they didn’t fully understand their choices, and how it was going to come back to them.

Welcome to being an adult.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Easier examples

> But the legal position in both UK law, and international law established in The Hague, is clear: yes the original author would be guilty of war crimes. Secretaries in the typing pool at the camps are still culpable.

Absolute nonsense.

Were the manufacturers of the typewriters used in the camps also guilty of war crimes? No, no they were not.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Easier examples

Excellent example. So, yes, the German owners of several factories that made the typewriters used to organise the Holocaust, were convicted of war crimes and either went to jail or committed suicide.

Rather notoriously however, IBM provided the punched card machines for the record-keeping. But the American IBM execs were *not* prosecuted. IBM as a company was much later sued by survivors, with partial settlement out of court.

Of particular note, is that IBM’s initial defense was that they didn’t control what was going on in Germany at their subsidiary Dehomag, from their New York offices. The US courts ruled that argument *inadmissible*. Also, it was shown to be a lie, but that’s not what got it thrown out of court.

[Lil Endian]

Re: Easier examples

So, yes, the German owners of several factories that made the typewriters used to organise the Holocaust, were convicted of war crimes and either went to jail or committed suicide.

Way to conflate.

Were any charges brought against the defendants for the manufacture of typewriters? Or, were the war crimes they were charged with related to.... war crimes?

If you could name the bloke that invented rope, I'm sure you'd have business counselling hangmen.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Easier examples

Sigh….

Many models of German typewriters of the era, civilian as well as military, had the SS runic key on the keyboard. This made them a highly visible symbol to the occupying forces after the war. Major manufacturers included Groma (in Chemnitz), Olympia (in Erfurt) and Seidel & Naumann (in Dresden). An intelligent person would already know where this is going, but I’ll plod through anyway.

Those factories were all in the East. The occupying forces were Soviet. Yes the Russians participated at Nuremberg, but they also held many other trials of a more or less summary variety. At least Olympia was official. But mostly you just had places like Groma. When the soldiers came through, and saw the typewriters on the line with the SS runics, they didn’t just shoot the factory boss. They branded the line-workers with heated metal typewriter keys, to ensure the weasels could never avoid responsibility and public shame for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, the Soviet troops were wrong, inasmuch as Chemnitz remains a fascist stronghold to this day, and those brandings were held as a badge of pride not shame.

The factories continued as Volkseigener Betrieb

[d.indjic]

Re: Easier examples

US court. Noted. As any "international law".

[doublelayer]

Re: Easier examples

You have made a bad analogy which damaged your point. Writing software that is extended to commit a crime is not the same as performing a nonessential purpose directly in the criminal organization. Typing in a concentration camp is still working for the organization committing the crimes and facilitating it. Making something they used without having any knowledge they were using it is not the same.

You like analogies? Here's mine. Let's say that I'm going to commit some war crimes, namely killing prisoners of war. You have a tool shop. I go to you, buy some hammers, and use them to start committing murders. Are you guilty? No, you are not. If I told you why I was buying the hammers, then you could be. If you gave me the hammers for the purpose, you would be. If you bought the hammers under false pretenses, then I am not guilty for what you chose to do with them. Developers of a library explicitly intended (either designed for or provided for) crimes are guilty for its use, whereas developers of software that is extended by others to commit a crime are not.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Easier examples

I get your point, but you can see how much pushback there is against license restriction against military/oppressive use. This isn’t passive omission, this is active “everybody should be able to use it”. That’s a very political stance; politics is about consequences, not which political party you do or don’t pay dues to.

In a world of hammers, this is insisting on selling hammer-and-nail combos at Calvary, to make the point that nobody should have the right to stop you.

You can avoid thinking about consequences if you like…but you can’t avoid the actual consequence, nor the blame.

If there’s *really* zero risk to others….then you should be very comfortable accepting that if it does harm others you suffer commensurate consequences with the harm. Because it won’t happen,right?

While if there is an unquantifiable life-ending risk to others….how dare you put it on them from thousands of kilometers, and you walk away and have a beer. It’s your responsibility to investigate and quantify the risk, and mitigate it.

[Lil Endian]

Re: Easier examples

You are using English words. Many have used words poorly, in all languages. Yet, the words are there, for future poor application.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: An early novice example for crash testing dummies

You are using English words. Many have used words poorly, in all languages. Yet, the words are there, for future poor application. .... Lil Endian

Quite so, Lil Endian, ..... they are the radically fundamental building blocks for all known alien civilisations since before even time began and space was a new virtual place for Greater IntelAIgent Games Play

Words create, command and control and destroy worlds which is why the politically inept and corrupt and intellectually stunted and bankrupted Western bloc heads so desperately try to micro and macro manage emerging new tales and future existence with both their constant sudden appearance and much more telling campaigns of novel disappearance and direct vetting ..... clumsy increasingly rapidly failing attempts at mass thought registration and sentiment realignment with the active remote connivance of all of the available platforms of media, both knowing and completely ignorant of their primary role in the enterprise of a very select few to Narrate a Compelling Autonomous Command and Atractive Compounding Control Led Future AIdVenture.

Well .... that's would be the Registered AIMasterplan of at least one of the few. Of that you can be sure. Quite whether you find that novel sort of noble Nobel breaking news assuring or terrifying I suppose depends upon which side of an evil live divide you find yourself immersed captive and captivated in ....... and that informs you that you do have a choice if you feel captured and helpless and want to be free/freed.

2023 .... the Year of the Surprising Underdog with Tails of the Sublime and Surreal and Totally Unexpected and Undeniable.

[Justthefacts]

Weird argument

Your argument seems to be, that OSS being used by oppressive regimes is not a problem because….they could do it themselves anyway if they have the resources and culture to do it.

Then, what is the point of OSS? By your argument, it is a *benefit* to nobody. Because anybody also could do it without you.

No, sorry, if you give someone a tool that is used to destroy lives, you remain fully responsible for all consequences. Positive and negative. The license doesn’t wash your hands. “I can’t control it after it leaves my hands” is not an ethical defense nor a legal one, in UK law anyway. Your legal responsibility is that you have chosen to *give* it to a mechanism that you can’t control the consequence.

That’s why the well-established principle exists that drunk drivers can be prosecuted for manslaughter. At the moment they hit the pedestrian, they aren’t responsible for their actions, because drunk. The criminal act of manslaughter occurs when they decide to get in the car, and *not care* about the consequence.

The law is 100% clear on this anyway. If your OSS code is used to do something against the law, you go to jail. Depending what they do, which you can’t control, you may well be convicted of genocide. If you don’t like that, *make different choices*.

[skein]

Re: Weird argument

Absolute tosh.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

Nobody cares about your opinion. If the consequences occur, those people will stand up in front of a war crimes trial. And be convicted. End of.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Weird argument

You keep saying that, but without providing any actual evidence of tool-makers being held responsible in such a manner, you are the tool. "End of".

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

Execs from Krupp, IG Farben, Flick, etc at Nuremberg?

Or maybe Gerald Bull? Iraqi supergun engineer. All he wanted was to design a cool new way to get satellites into space. Just a tool. He was prosecuted (of course), failed, and then he was assassinated. It might not be what *you* had in mind for being held responsible but it certainly fits *my* definition.

[stiine]

Re: Weird argument

You're not seriously saying that Krupp only made typewriters? With no slave labour? And eded up on trial after the war for that reason? You are stupid.

[doublelayer]

Re: Weird argument

"Execs from Krupp, IG Farben, Flick, etc at Nuremberg?"

You appear not to know why these people were convicted. Let's review. The indictment lists their crimes. Missing from those lists are anything to do with their products being used for crimes. The lists do include things like using enslaved workers, stealing from occupied territories and concentration camp victims, and providing funding to war crimes. These things are actual crimes, and those are what people were charged for.

How about what they were found guilty of? The following charge was the one that affected all of the defendants at the Krupp trial and wasn't dropped:

Crimes against humanity by participating in the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians who came under German control, German nationals, and prisoners of war;

And some were also found guilty under this one:

Crimes against humanity by participating in the plundering, devastation, and exploitation of occupied countries;

That's it for the Krupp trial. No other charges received convictions. The use of their products is not why these people were on trial.

[Lil Endian]

Re: Weird argument

Thanks for referring when I couldn't dive in.

[Sorry, didn't read yours first.]

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Weird argument

> if you give someone a tool that is used to destroy lives, you remain fully responsible for all consequences.

So IKEA are criminally liable if one of their kitchen knives is used to kill someone?

[Lil Endian]

Re: Weird argument

After eight hours of looking for 'Angle Bracket B', they were criminally liable for wife #4!!!

[doublelayer]

Re: Weird argument

You appear to have a few misconceptions about the law. Here's one:

"That’s why the well-established principle exists that drunk drivers can be prosecuted for manslaughter. At the moment they hit the pedestrian, they aren’t responsible for their actions, because drunk."

Rubbish. You are not excused of your responsibility for your actions by being drunk. They committed crimes just by driving a vehicle, whether you hit someone or not. Hitting the person is a second crime, and your being drunk does not in any exonerate you. Doing something else while drunk isn't excused either. If you get into a fight while you're drunk, you can still be charged with assault.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

Actually, no. It is you who have the misconception. To commit any crime, you need “mens rea”. You need a “guilty mind” and have an understanding what you are doing. That’s a basic legal principle. For example, if you sleepwalk and punch someone in your dream, you are *not* guilty.

Now, there’s a flaw in that, when it comes to being drunk and causing harm, which the law needed to repair, and it did repair it. The doctrine (in the UK at least) is that the “mens rea” occurs *at the time when you decide to put yourself in the position of being drunk*. That’s when you are reckless.

To come to your point, yes there’s a reason that Driving Under Influence is a crime in itself. And manslaughter is a separate crime.

But the *reason* that being drunk does not exonerate you from manslaughter, is because you *chose* to get drunk. And there are exceptions to this, which have actually occurred in court. For example, if someone spiked your drink. It is possible to claim that you were unaware how impaired your ability was, and that the alcohol caused the accident, and then not guilty, despite that you were clearly driving. Quite a high bar of proof, but it has been successfully argued.

[Norman Nescio]

Re: Weird argument

Actually, no. It is you who have the misconception. To commit any crime, you need “mens rea”. You need a “guilty mind” and have an understanding what you are doing. That’s a basic legal principle. For example, if you sleepwalk and punch someone in your dream, you are *not* guilty.

I'm sorry to say it is you that is incorrect here.

Some crimes do not require a mens rea.

One example is the crime of speeding. You might not have noticed the speed limit sign, so you certainly didn't plan or intend to exceed the speed limit. It is an absolute liability offence - if you are determined to be exceeding the speed limit, you are guilty, mens rea or not.

There is also some admixture with strict liability offences.

So while as a general principle in the law of England&Wales mens rea is required for a crime to be committed, it is not true in all cases. It is not true for any crime.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

There are very few strict liability offences in the UK. Mostly regulatory breaches - H&S, speeding, driving without insurance, contempt of court, criminal libel. Manslaughter whether or not drunk isn’t one of them. Nor is dangerous driving, nor reckless endangerment.

Nor is GBH, ABH, assault, conspiracy to rape, fraud, theft, or any one of dozens of other harms that might result from reckless release of tools. So, mens rea it is.

Which does, as I say, include recklessness and including “ closing one's eyes to an obvious risk” (R v Parker). That’s for offences against the person. Criminal damage is different again

[Norman Nescio]

Re: Weird argument

To quote what you said:

To commit any crime, you need “mens rea”. You need a “guilty mind” and have an understanding what you are doing. That’s a basic legal principle.

You said 'any crime'. You've now given a list of 'strict liability' crimes where mens rea is not necessarily required. So your original statement was incorrect. If you had said 'most crimes', I'd have agreed with you, but you made an absolute statement, which was unwise.

[gnasher729]

Re: Weird argument

Don’t know if it’s real. But supposedly in Germany being drunk counts as mitigating. Unless you put yourself into a drunken state yourself voluntarily. Which probably covers more than 99% of drunk drivers.

[ChoHag]

Re: Weird argument

Who drew the designs of the car which is capable of killing pedestrians?

Give that fire back!

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

Again, another good example. The principle involved is “reasonable precautions”

If you pretend to be a competent design engineer, and design something that leaks petrol, then yes you are culpable for that.

The usual defense is that most safety-critical stuff like cars, we do as large companies, and ensure safety with design process. But in case that fails, and deliberate engineering negligence can be proved, yes we have legislation for corporate manslaughter. See Ford Pinto.

A good lesson from this: write into your OSS software license “not licensed for use in safety-critical applications…or applications that can cause financial loss”. Companies do. Look at any Bluetooth or WiFi stack. Why don’t you? How hard is it to think of this stuff? And why don’t you care enough to do something about it?

[Lil Endian]

Re: Weird argument

...if you give someone a tool that is used to destroy lives, you remain fully responsible for all consequences.... drunk drivers can be prosecuted for manslaughter.

So, you are asserting that the vehicle manufacturer is also culpable, and should be prosecuted. And the brewer, glass maker, draymen, petrol station staff and supply chain, tailor, barber, the tarmacers and tyre manufacturers...

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

The EU recently passed a law to require cars to have a breathalyser lock.

https://euroweeklynews.com/2022/06/05/breathalyser-lock-to-be-fitted-to-all-new-cars-in-the-eu/amp/

The driver has a “reasonable expectation” they can drive if they pass. The car manufacturer will push back. But in the end if the driver has one glass of wine, their car says they can drive, and then they get pulled over for drunk driving after an accident, yes the driver will sue manufacturer and win. So yes, car manufacturer now shared liability under some circumstance.

Brewers *are* also legally liable for the correctness of the ABV they post. And have in the past indeed been prosecuted for over-strength beer as well as under-strength beer. So that’s another Epic Fail for you.

Probably all the other nine contributions also have edge-cases where they are legally liable, I can’t be bothered to check all your homework. You didn’t, why should I? A basic Google on either of these before you opened your mouth would have shown you the issue with what you were saying.

I’m finding this annoying, because you’re clearly saying things that you can’t be bothered to sanity check. All you want to do is show your allegiance to the OSS flag rather than understand whether anything you say is true. And whether you should change your perspective on facts you seem unaware of. So I’m done here.

[Lil Endian]

Fantabulous Argument

Your generation of fantabulous convolutions is admirable!

...if the driver has one glass of wine... they get pulled over for drunk driving... -- Then they had more wine while driving, or their gear isn't calibrated to their jurisdiction. Or the cop's bent? What is in your mind?

Brewers *are* also legally liable for the correctness of the ABV they post. -- A totally separate issue. So that’s another Epic Fail for you. You called it.

I’m finding this annoying, because you’re clearly saying things that you can’t be bothered to sanity check. -- And there you have it! You're getting good at this!

So I’m done here. I feel the need to send Charlie Chaplin a telegram... "Please, please, please...."

[An_Old_Dog]

Software Creators' Liability

We have no good standard of "reasonable care", or "due dilligence" in regard to this sort of blame. So much software is dual/multi-purpose that by current legal standards, the only legally-safe thing for coders to do is to not code it, because it might be used for evil. Blame the creators of Emacs or vi because, for a hypothetical example, it was used by terrorists to type up hit-lists? Some software mal-uses can easily be forseen (image recognition-software); others cannot.

And sometimes, the law is an ass.

[Lil Endian]

Re: Software Creators' Liability

Emacs coders, yeah I can see that - it's obviously daemon spawn. But vi? I mean c'mon! It's sainted!

[Mine's the one with a backup of 'ed' on three and a half in the pocket.]

(And sometimes, the law is an ass. -- Never a truer phrase typed!)

[An_Old_Dog]

Ed is the standard text editor

a

I've got a copy on my system, and have used it in anger. :-)

.

w

q

[Robert Grant]

Re: Weird argument

> The law is 100% clear on this anyway. If your OSS code is used to do something against the law, you go to jail. Depending what they do, which you can’t control, you may well be convicted of genocide. If you don’t like that, *make different choices*.

Can you cite this law?

[gnasher729]

Re: Weird argument

It’s not _one law_. Any law that makes something criminal, if you commit the crime using open source software you are guilty. Or if you commit the crime using a hairbrush, you are guilty.

OSS doesn’t have to tell you not to use it to commit crimes.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: Weird argument

if you give someone a tool that is used to destroy lives, you remain fully responsible for all consequences.

I guess I won't be releasing my Cure for Cancer any time soon because I'm not spending my life in jail when someone uses it to murder others.

Thankfully we have the concept of mens rea - which you acknowledge yourself - which determines whether those involved in any chain are actually responsible for an end result or outcome.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

“Mens rea” includes not just the intention to do it, but also recklessness and negligence. A person acts negligently if they should have been aware of a substantial and unjustifiable risk that a certain consequence would result from their actions.

As to not releasing your Cure for Cancer because “I'm not spending my life in jail when someone uses it to murder others.” Hooray! That is exactly the result the Law requests from you, for many good reasons that have been extensively discussed by people who’ve thought about it much more than you have.

I won’t convince you of the reasons, as you are obviously a moral vacuum. But as long as we agree that if you try to release your Cure for Cancer as open-source software, you’re going to f*ing jail for the rest of your life, and good people will piss on your grave, we’re all good here.

[Lil Endian]

Re: Weird argument

“Mens rea” includes not just the intention to do it, but also recklessness and negligence.

I don't think so. That's strict liability.

Perhaps lay off of the ad hominem. It sounds like this: take your own medicine, a quick web search before you open your mouth *yadda yadda*. Which jurisdiction does your invisible friend live in?

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

https://www.lexisnexis.co.uk/legal/guidance/recklessness-in-criminal-cases

[Lil Endian]

Re: Weird argument

I appreciate the link. That case gives legal precedent that:

the prosecution [can] prove mens rea on the basis of ‘recklessness’ -- ie. that mens rea applies.

So, "mens rea" requires intention, the recklessness attempted as a defence is used to prove intention. It's not the same thing as you stated:

“Mens rea” includes not just the intention to do it, but also recklessness and negligence.

That statement is wrong. Recklessness may not be used to avoid "mens rea". Fair enough, a semantic quibble, but then that's good enough for the barristers!

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: Weird argument

you are obviously a moral vacuum.

And you are obviously a complete wanker if we are descending to that level.

But as long as we agree that if you try to release your Cure for Cancer as open-source software, you’re going to f*ing jail for the rest of your life, and good people will piss on your grave, we’re all good here.

No, I don't agree with that. You are talking out your arse.

[LionelB]

Re: Weird argument

Absurd poppycock.

Apart from anything else, unconstrained liability for nefarious uses of technology—or, for that matter, any intellectual estate—by 3rd parties would completely destroy (open) science. (Should we retrospectively prosecute Isaac Newton at a war crimes tribunal because his equations have been used to guide ballistic missiles targetting civilian populations?)

[Justthefacts]

Re: Weird argument

What if it were the principle and plans for a nuclear fusion device, similar to JET torus but compressed to tabletop size and cost. Human Benefit huge, military risk also huge. Then, do you agree that unconstrained info release is unethical and illegal?

If you agree on that case, all we’re talking about is complexity of product, risk assessment and management process. If not, there’s no more to discuss.

There already *is* regulation in progress. The EU proposes to regulate “risky AI”, and inside that legislation it already recognises that implies regulating datasets too, which are mostly open-source, and and and.

Also, why not pick Fritz Haber instead of Newton? This is where your argument leads in practice:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-13015210.amp

[doublelayer]

Re: Weird argument

Your resort to what if questions is harming your point. Regulations already exist to deal with those. Therefore, an open source chemical weapon maker is illegal, but not because of open source. It's illegal because of chemical weapon maker. You would go to jail because you made something illegal. If you make something legal, you don't go to jail, even if another person later finds a way to do something illegal with the thing you made legally. If you weren't a participant in their illegal act, the fact that you're useful doesn't cause you to be culpable.

People made cars. People have killed people with cars by intentionally running over them. The inventors and manufacturers of cars are not culpable for those murders.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Weird argument

People made cars. People have killed people with cars by intentionally running over them. The inventors and manufacturers of cars are not culpable for those murders.

That has changed somewhat, and not necessarily for the better. So in the US there have been cases against firearms manufacturers because their products have been improperly used. Sometimes even if that's just been for 'supply', and actual supply has been lawfully sold/transferred via a dealer. Similar principles could (and sometimes have) been applied to other manufacturers, so it's a potentially slippery slope. There's extensive anti-firearm lobbying, less extensive against car manufacturers. But existing legislation seems adequate, even if it's being extended in dubious ways. So the nutjob who drove into the parade a while back is going to be locked up for a very long time. Car manufacturers still have liability if their products are defective, but there's scope creep with mandated tech like vehicle tracking, or breath interlocks.

[LionelB]

Re: Weird argument

You seem to have missed my "unconstrained liability" point. Technology that is clearly dangerous in the wrong hands is already (legally) constrained. Or maybe you're just backtracking on your original assertion(s)?

[robot66]

Fear of China is like the fear of Japan in the 80's and 90's. But in the cold war, the US drummed up hatred of Communists and Athiests, In our current crazy politics it would be easy to create another McCarthy. I hope we treat China like Japan and not like Russia.

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep politics out of open source

No, open-source should be neutral and stay well away from politics.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Definitely.

Open source isn't a political tool, and besides, you can't do anything to prevent "them" from using it, since Open Source is, well, you'd never guess, "open"... What would you do? Create a license which states that anybody can fork it -- except those we chose at some point to call the "Bad Guys"? And, "them" being bad to the bone, will they refrain from using it nevertheless? Utter nonsense. This is political willy-waving spilling onto serious things, somebody please get a mop before it leaves any stains.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I think their ultimate goal is to change the license of open-source software to enforce political agendas. So that if you violate the Contributor Covenant speech code, you lose the license to use the software. Yes, that is what these activists want to do, it is nothing to do with ethics, it is all about power and control. And I know in particular this is absolutely the case with Coraline Ada Ehmke at least, someone who is trying to dismantle the meritocratic culture in open source and likely replace it with something political instead.

The same kind of politics you get in a corporate environment has now come to open source software. So it's open source's equivalent of the HR department.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> you lose the license

And that will scare the bad guys away?

I feel much safer since I've put up a notice on my door stating that it is forbidden to break in...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I have memories of certain encryption methods on the banned from export listed as "munitions" from the USA. They were, of course, easy to get a hold of and s/w which had optional dependencies on it simply asked you if you were allowed to use it and, naturally, happily compiled and ran with the "banned" encryption included, no matter where in the world you lived.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

You could also get the source code legally printed on a t shirt for some algorithms... Protected under freedom of speech.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"You could also get the source code legally printed on a t shirt for some algorithms... Protected under freedom of speech."

Printing something on a T-shirt doesn't make it free speech. That's like saying if you don't pull over for a police officer, you are untouchable if you make it home and park up in your driveway.

[Toe Knee]

@MachDiamond

> Printing something on a T-shirt doesn't make it free speech.

The US Federal judiciary disagrees. According to them, printed versions were protected speech, while the electronic versions were munitions. I’m too lazy to find the case citations at the moment.

I specifically remember Cracking DES:

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8667288M/Cracking_DES

Legal, technical, and common terms quite often don’t share the same definitions.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: @MachDiamond

I specifically remember Cracking DES:

I still have a copy of that. It's a great book, especially if you're a programmer, otherwise the OCR test pages aren't the most riveting read. But it also covers a lot of the theory and design for creating dedicated hardware. First published in 1998, and hardware had moved on just a tad, so hopefully nobody is still using DES for anything sensitive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @MachDiamond

Remember when this number was deemed illegal under the US DCMA? 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Might still be since its not in printed format on here so better go anon

[MiguelC]

Re: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

No one has been arrested or charged for finding or publishing the original key.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I'm more than happy to take all of the downvotes. Just keep my words in mind if you put it to the test. If you have to defend yourself and pay an attorney, you've lost whether you are sent to the big house or not. Oh yeah, not paying your attorney is really bad.

[d.indjic]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Like bitcoin et al.

[Sanguma]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I keep tigers away by throwing breadcrumbs around my house. I haven't seen any tigers since I started doing it, so it's working!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

It is about power and control. I think some people dont understand the value of other people and perspectives.

Open source is for me generally a social good. People of all kinds will be enabled to achive their aims and because of its existance creativity and openness is sparked in some people.

Like manditory education it has made the world a better place but no-one could have predicted the world it created.

Some people cannot trust in good fundamentals because they dont trust in others. which is odd when you use software that is provided as is

[Dan 55]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

This is not new, there are "not for military use" and "not for evil" licences and they've been around for quite a while. Whether they're effective at all is another discussion.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

>not for military use" and "not for evil" licences

And this is enforced by ?

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

And this is enforced by ?

Criminal and civil legislation? See-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20959319

A retired British businessman who admitted selling weapon parts to Iran has been sentenced to 33 months in prison by a court in the US.

Initial reporting on that case was pretty bad, ie man arrested and threated with extradition because he sold batteries. Seemed a bit harsh, but then with a little digging, the batteries were rather specialised, and the end-user rather problematic. I strongly suspect the same laws would apply if you tried to transfer the Hawk's software, but being digital, harder for TPTB to detect that.

See also-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYVZh5kqaFg

Where Mark Rober attempts a world record egg drop. In which he creates an improvised guided missile, and someone explains why experts probably wouldn't tell him how to improve his design's accuracy. It's a relatively simple physics and control systems engineering problem, but posting detailed designs and code would probably result in a request to take it down. Or else. Again it's one of those things where the genie has long left the bottle. Missiles being lobbed in both directions at the moment were often designed using 1980s or 1990 era hardware, and that's only got smaller, cheaper and faster.

[stiine]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

What Mark Rober demonstrated in that video was that any mid-talent geek can implement a 'guidance computer.' And SpaceX has demonstrated, more than 100 times, that with enough money anyone can build a guided missle. Its not that much harder to hit a target, from orbit, at 8000kph than it is to successfully land on that same target.

[Aitor 1]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Actually much easier to hit the target as speed is(mostly, after having adequate materials) not an issue.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"And SpaceX has demonstrated, more than 100 times, that with enough money anyone can build a guided missle."

There was a long line of governments and private companies that had done the same thing long before Elon came along. John Carmack, computer game author, was doing it before Elon with Armadillo Aerospace.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

>A retired British businessman who admitted selling weapon parts to Iran has been sentenced to 33 months in prison by a court in the US.

So if a contributor to GNU SDR included "not for military use" and the US Coastguard used it - he could have the British courts extradite the US president as CinC to rule on whether the Coastguard counted as military ?

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

So if a contributor to GNU SDR included "not for military use" and the US Coastguard used it - he could have the British courts extradite the US president as CinC to rule on whether the Coastguard counted as military ?

They could try I guess, although it'd probably be easier to make a civil claim for breach of contract. Enforcing that may prove a tad trickier.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> but being digital, harder for TPTB to detect that

Well, you gave your own counter-argument. What works for hardware doesn't work for software, which is virtual and thus near impossible to trace. All right, the forbidden code appears in the hands of the Bad Guys. What can/will you do?

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

What works for hardware doesn't work for software, which is virtual and thus near impossible to trace. All right, the forbidden code appears in the hands of the Bad Guys. What can/will you do?

Hope for leniency? But it's one of those disruptive things we've created along with the Internet, ie the ability to share information. Some of that information might be classified, an official secret, or subject to regulation and legislation. Ignorance has rarely been a good defence. Alongside this, we've introduced 'thought crimes' in the guise of anti-terrorism legislation, where knowing or possessing information that might cause harm could be a serious offence.

So you could potentially end up going to prison for quite some time. Or perhaps you'll get a request to take down whatever you've published. Or an order to do the same, and not attempt to share or publish it anywhere else. Or, if you've knowingly shared forbidden code with a hostile actor, then you could be in a lot of trouble. It's one of those areas where it pays to have some common sense, ie thinking about whether whatever you're about to publish could get abused or misused. But that isn't an exact science, ie you can't just email TPTB and ask for a list of everything that's restricted, just in case.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> Hope for leniency?

Leniency? What for? The public prosecutor will need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it is you who gave it to them, which (unless you're terminally stupid) is about as impossible a task as it gets.

Unless you somehow were caught red-handed, as I said above, nobody can prove anything, and since proof is required, you walk.

To illustrate, let's say VLC was put under export control. Now please explain how you would legally manage to throw VLC's devs in prison if the latest version turns up in "Bad Guys Country"? You can download it about anywhere, and anyone who has downloaded it can give it to anybody, anywhere. Can you legally imprison somebody for something he hasn't done? No. Who will you imprison? Some unknown random, potentially residing in a different country? Good luck with that...

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

To illustrate, let's say VLC was put under export control. Now please explain how you would legally manage to throw VLC's devs in prison if the latest version turns up in "Bad Guys Country"? You can download it about anywhere, and anyone who has downloaded it can give it to anybody, anywhere.

That's a bad example, and not really how it works. As you say, VLC is already out there, in the wild, and generally legislation isn't applied retroactively. VLC would probably be told that their software is now under ITAR and on the designatied USML (US Munitions List), and therefore subject to all it's controls. Then it would be up to the developers to ensure they met all the ITAR requirements, and export licensing conditions. If those developers include non-US people, sorry, they'd have to go because unless they can be vetted and cleared, they can't touch or possess the code.

Again it's one of those common sense things. People should be reasonably aware of what's considered sensitive, eg the RADAR example given earlier. If in doubt, check the USML. If your tech is included in that list, you need to take precautions and comply with ITAR. Prosecution then gets relatively straightforward. You are the custodian of something on the USML, you are obligated to ensure it's security and it can't just be downloaded to anywhere in the world. There are some protections, so if you had a compliant security system in place and got hacked with a ZDE, you might be OK. If you were negligent, you're not. Governments (at least parts of them) take this stuff rather seriously because some software can be very dangerous.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> As you say, VLC is already out there, in the wild

Seriously? While admitting that VLC is "already out there", you go on explaining that once it is considered "ammunition" by the US government everything would change. How, since you admit it's already all over the place?

Besides you say foreign devs would have to go, ignoring the fact that this would mean all of them, since IIRC it's a french project!... Chances are VLC would simply give the US government the finger and keep doing what it has been doing since the beginning (ie. working for the destruction of western civilization as we know it...).

Are you really that oblivious to the physical impossibility of controlling Open Source, something wildly distributed all over the planet, completely out of the jurisdiction of any one government? I'm all for US-centrism, but please try to understand that there are several billion people on this planet who don't give a damn about USML, ITAR or any other US regulation - simply because they don't live in the USA or any of its subsidiaries.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"knowing or possessing information that might cause harm could be a serious offence."

They'll have you in the lockup even faster if you are in possession of a 'short' lobster even if you bought it from the fish monger.

There are so many laws on the books and even a law in the US that you could be on the hook for breaking a law on some other country's books.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Terrible argument. If your best argument is “I can’t think of a technical way to implement software traceability”, then all my side has to do is to work out how to do so.

Actually, it’s not so hard technically, if the will exists. In fact, partial solutions *already* exist: code-signing certificates preventing non-authenticated software executing on increasingly-locked HW and OS platforms. Thats what you don’t like about them: not that it’s impossible, but that it *is* possible and companies are doing it against your will.

In fact, now I think about it, there’s at least two other ways to do this. One of them I think I’ve seen, but the other seems new to me…..I might patent it, just to really annoy people…

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"And this is enforced by ?"

Exactly. If you've opted for "Creative Commons" rather than registering a copyright, your prohibitions might not be upheld in court but your allowances could be. So you can say "not for military uses" and it might not matter. If you leave a mark that you are giving away your creative work, that could be considered and effective abandonment.

Granted, I got this info from my attorney so he's going to be biased. The thing is that if I register and license my work, he may take a case on contingency. If I post work with a Creative Commons mark, he won't, ever. The more work that an attorney sees it might take to pursue a case, the more retainer they will want up front. Yes, you could win but it could also be a pyrrhic victory. For something like a military use prohibition, you have to consider the sort of defendant you might be up against. Pick one with a big internal legal department or a government and fuggetaboutit.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Rubbish. Nothing to do with politics. You do or make something, there are consequences, you are responsible for those consequences.

I don’t define who “the Bad Guys” are.

Governments do, and we both live within the law. Usage doesn’t have to be some foreign government. It could be, for example, you write some innocent data-dredging code…which then gets pulled into some cyber-stalking tool to identify the location of people who’ve used cash at night, to mug them. If that code gets traced back to you…to jail you go. And rightly so.

“Wah wah but I wrote myself a License”. Big man baby.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> If that code gets traced back to you…

And how exactly do you plan to trace that code back? The developer (or Github, or whoever) can always claim it has been stolen, potentially from somebody else, and unless you catch somebody red-handed you'd be hard-pressed to accuse anybody in particular. Sorry, but that's how law works, righteous wrath doesn't have anything to say in it. This idea is clearly unenforceable, impossible to implement, and thus would be just empty political gesturing.

_{(Didn't downvote you though.)}

[Zolko]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I don’t define who “the Bad Guys” are. Governments do

no: that's what religions do. What governments do define is what is legal, not what is good or bad. And even less so about people as a such : there are no "Bad Guys " in the world apart in Hollywood movies.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Jeez what next “Guns don’t kill people, Rappers do”

Grow up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

My girlfriend's daughter knows some Atlanta rappers. Actually one fewer than she knew last year because, well, they're rappers. She did surprise us by not going to his funeral, so she's not a complete idiot.

If you have two loaded pistols and put one in a wall safe and give the other one to an Atlanta rapper, the one in the safe isn't going to kill anyone, and the one you gave to an Atlanta rapper is likely to be used to shoot and possibly kill someone. In other words, the pistols aren't the problem.

[ThatOne]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

> “Guns don’t kill people, Rappers do”

Indeed, and I'm all for banning rappers.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

You can’t do anything to prevent its use? Then, why bother writing a license? And if you thought it was being ignored, what possible harm would there be to adding a clause “can’t be used for military purposes, or to kill or imprison civilians”?

You know the answer of course.

[Zolko]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

you can't be serious: how could a license for a 3D CAD software – for example FreeCAD – decide what sort of 3D stuff can be designed with it ? Or take a compiler: can the license restrict what sort of software can be compiled with it ? Or take a DC motor drive, or take an image recognition program: can the license state what sort of things can be recognised with it ?

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

#1 CAD software: Yes. Legal and technical precedents A: photocopiers and high-end printers include hardware and software techniques that specifically prevents them counterfeiting currency and other documents for decades. B: Similar fingerprinting techniques are now going into 3D CAD software, and 3D printers, providing steganographic serial numbers who designed and made. C: Some Chip-design CAD/EDA tools (synthesisers and libraries) contain techniques to make items rad-hard-by-design, e.g. triplicating logic. The techniques are fairly well-known, but such software is ITAR-controlled, if you decided to just write one yourself outside and open-source outside the US (people have, a noob implementation that’s not actually useful, but they have) you’ll find yourself on the wrong end of ITAR with serious long-term consequences for you and your organisation.

#2 Compiler. Yes. Ditto to Chip EDA. There are Classified techniques for certain purposes - software techniques, not targeting to CPUs. If you accidentally came up with one of those on your own, and open-sourced it, you’d get a visit.

#3 DC motor. Yes, not my area though. A motor that meets certain specs on robustness to vibration and radiation, is going to be ITAR-controlled. If you sell it, and the buyer uses it on the battlefield in Ukraine, the seller is *personally, individually, criminally* liable. There’s a reason why people don’t like doing ITAR work, beyond whatever their personal politics are. You won’t like it, but the rules are there.

#4 Image recognition. Yes. That’s the most obvious point raised in this debate, e.g. what happens if your innocent image recognition program ends up on the front-end of a Uighur concentration camp. But historically, if you don’t know, the leading-edge of image-recognition technology was terrain-following in Tomahawk cruise missiles back in the eighties. So it absolutely is considered Defense-critical.

[doublelayer]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

"You can’t do anything to prevent its use? Then, why bother writing a license?"

The license gets obeyed a bit more often by smaller entities. If I write something and the license says "Amazon may not use this software", then Amazon is unlikely to be using my software because I can sue them and they can lose. They might come to me and ask me to change the license, they might have an employee make a new version of what I did to get around the licensing issue (nicely confusing the legal argument and making their legal position much stronger), or they may just find a different way to accomplish their goal, but they're not likely to flout the license unless they can hide it. If I say "The Chinese government and military are not to use this software", and they decide they want to, I cannot sue them and expect to get anything, and they know this, so they have no reason to care about what I said.

"And if you thought it was being ignored, what possible harm would there be to adding a clause “can’t be used for military purposes, or to kill or imprison civilians”?"

There is no harm to that, but it is contrary to things like the open source definition. Theoretically, it means that military forces of countries I do like wouldn't be allowed to use it either. The reason it's not allowed as free software is that people would come up with lots of other criteria of who is allowed to use it which would compromise the goals of the movement (E.G. no making money from it, no using with Windows, no use by people in [insert country you hate]). If you want to make this license and accept that you won't be categorized as FOSS, there is no problem.

[Justthefacts]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

You’re being disingenuous. What you’re actually saying is “what can poor little old me do, to enforce that great harms do not occur”. To which the actual answer is: “Nothing. Not without massive organisational, ethical and legal support.” Which is why, on a *case-by-case basis*, it is entirely inappropriate that individuals andlone-wolf academic organisations should be making such releases.

There’s plenty of analogous situations: e.g. research using human foetuses, and IVF in general, is incredibly challenging ethically. Everyone knows what the right answer is to all the questions….except everyone’s right answer is different. Do we let every individual doctor do what they think is best? Or even whole academic departments? No. We have a Human Fertlitsation and Embryology Authority. And we don’t move until the ethical rules are agreed.

The rest of it is just “but I’d have to compromise on FOSS principle, and everyone would restrict”. Yes. Yes, you and others would need to compromise. Implementation of ethical conduct always requires compromise and really hard choices.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

I see this more as politicians needing a good kick in the pants so they realize that you don't hold back the tide with a spoon. There are many things that they have no hope in controlling and shouldn't even try. To go further, there are some things that don't need money to solve and the best action might be no action at all. There are even cases where deleting laws and regulations rather than creating new ones solves the problem.

[amanfromMars 1]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

No, open-source should be neutral and stay well away from politics. .... standup

And politics is well advised to stay well away from open source ..... for it is an environment in which the wrong move provokes/invokes dire irreversible consequences ..... aka catastrophic self-harming results as one’s worthy just reward.

Notwithstanding that clear simple advisory, are there bound to many destroyed victims littering the field too ignorant and/or too arrogant to understand and heed the fact that their presence is unwelcome, unnecessary and unhealthy.

[katrinab]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Open Source and Free Software is political.

Non-free software is political.

There is no way to avoid politics.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Inasmuch as OS is an umbrella term involving licenses, which are matters for courts, which interpret and apply laws, which are passed by politicians, you are correct. But breathing increases the CO2 in the atmosphere, which...

You have to draw the line somewhere or you lose the ability to clearly communicate.

This effort is clearly part of a broader effort to politicize more or less everything, to the advantage of the hard left.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Exactly!

If it did take a politicl stance, who decides what? Who decides which side to support? Who decides "good guys and bad guys"?

No, a quagmire lies that way, just stay out and carry on. FOSS is just a tool like a drill, saw or knife. People pick up tools and they decide what to do with them, not the manufacturer. To put it more crudely, "Guns don't kill people, rappers do!".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep politics out of open source

Because that's not a political position, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep activists like Coraline out of open source

Coraline Ada Ehmke has already done enough damage to the open-source community by imposing speech codes on participants, such as her Contributor Covenant. And we don't want her gaining even more power by taking advantage of recent events.

https://archive.is/EBcZO

People like her within the community, who try to control the language that we use, are why I am no longer interested in contributing to open source software.

The corporate bullshit has come to open source.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Keep activists like Coraline out of open source

Codes of conduct on Open Source projects were around well before 2018...

I've been using OS since the 80's...

I smell a radical pushing a specific political agenda...

[Binraider]

Re: Keep activists like Coraline out of open source

I'd have a go at the ludicrous labelling situation we find ourselves in where people are asked to include their pronouns for reasons, despite the act of labelling itself being the very cause of segregation in the first place.

As much as I agree with you there is a potent and very vocal minority that are determined to make hell of culture, you know, the types that would see the dogs name deleted out of the dambusters .

If we deleted every word and phrase that could be deemed offensive, the language would be very small indeed.

[Mr Finance]

Sometimes. This is the same issue for scienctific papers and patents. There is a huge internal rate of progress benefit to keeping these things open, offset by a significant but not quite as huge external negative of letting tyranical regimes around the world benefit from that same progress. However the author is correct there remains an absurd level of naievity in both open source and academia that will need to change. Like it or not, we are back in a cold war with some very unpleasant regimes. There is a significant subset of papers and open source that should remain unpublished as trade secrets and a level of control should and will be placed on universities and repositories to ensure review processes exist so the worst and most obvious cases do not find their way through.

[Anonymous Coward]

Code is speech

I absolutely disagree, code is speech and we cannot place restrictions on contributors' ability to speak freely.

[Mr Finance]

Re: Code is speech

And free speech is indeed a very nice right to have young man. Enjoy exercising that right under emperor Xi. Or we could just apply a little common sense today. Nobody's proposing stopping you writing the code or doing the research, just maybe occasionally dont shoot your mouth off to the enemy just because you 'have the right'.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Code is speech

If you think restricting free speech is going to help the West's development, then you should really read some history books...

[Sanguma]

Re: Code is speech

What I like about Britain beginning the whole "free speech" thing, is how haphazard it all was - we had the Magna Carta, which was strictly between the barons and the king at the time, though it did have nice things to say about the freemen. Then there was that German who came over and took the throne, and since he couldn't at the time speak English, the parliamentarians took a long holiday from passing law in favour of wenching and partying and getting blotto. Amongst the laws that didn't get passed or renewed was one of censorship. And when the parliamentarians finally got back to business, they noticed the law of censorship hadn't been renewed and the wheels hadn't fallen off the world, so in keeping with the primal law of the less effort the better, they dropped it.

Such laziness should be encouraged.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Code is speech

"Fact can be stranger than fiction, because fiction is limited by what we can imagine."

Wow. I'm afraid to look if if that's how it actually happened...

[abetancort]

Re: Code is speech

Who is the enemy? You start to see them when a country like China can topple the US from the top economic power.

[ThatOne]

Re: Code is speech

> China can topple the US from the top economic power

Sorry but the USA was (over)ripe for the picking. Too much resting on one's laurels I'm afraid, thinking the world would stand still and never ever dare challenge one's supremacy. If History teaches us something, it's that great empires rise and fade, eventually. Ask the Babylonians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans (and so on).

[M. T. Ness]

There should be room for common sense too, not only licences and laws. If releasing a piece of software to the bad guys would make the situation worse for someone, then that could be weighed against the benefit to the good guys before a decision is taken about releasing source code.

A unified policy in such matters would not IMHO cover all cases well.

But I'm sure this happens already.

[John Brown (no body)]

"If releasing a piece of software to the bad guys would make the situation worse for someone, then that could be weighed against the benefit to the good guys before a decision is taken about releasing source code."

Not enough "experts in the field" to do that, so it will be politicians and civil servants wielding the rubber stamps, so most likely it will inconvenience honest and "good" people while the "bad" people will still obtain what they need one way or another.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between supplying the software to the bad guys directly and generally publishing the software. I guess if you are directly and intentionally supplying the enemy, then that could be made illegal, under "conspiracy" laws. But if you publish it in general for everyone worldwide, I would be very concerned about the implications for freedom of speech. And I personally believe code is speech. Therefore general publication should be completely legal.

[abetancort]

Which one is this war?

Seeing how successful has been the war on drugs, and the war on terror, I think it would be better to stop forcing wars on anything because it won’t be successful as the previous wars weren’t

[b0llchit]

Restrictions != F(L)OSS

There is no discussion possible. The definition of terms for the license to be a valid open source license are:

5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups

The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

and

6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor

The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

Therefore, any restrictions in the distribution based on political winds makes the project no longer F(L)OSS.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

There is no discussion possible. The definition of terms for the license to be a valid open source license are:

Potentially incompatible with national and international law. If a country, like the US, or a trading bloc like the EU decides it's illegal to provide a good or service to another nation, or individual, they have the power to pass legislation and punish violators. Which is kind of back to the days of my old T-shirt with export controlled crypto printed on it. Non-state sanctioned crypto used to be illegal in France. But look how that played out. The genie's well and trully out of the bottle when source code is so easily distributed by so many mechanisms.

In the speech, she opined: "Open source software today is playing a critical role in mass surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, protester suppression, racially biased policing and the development and use of cruel and inhumane weapons."

She's right. Google, Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Palantir etc etc all use, or used OSS to perform those critical roles on a massive scale. The whole Internet pretty much relies on it, and attempting to have one authoritarian regime ban or block another is pretty pointless, especially when heavily sanctioned nations have always found workarounds. Or just develops their own alternatives. That's kind of the problem with attempting to punish a country like China. It has a rather large population that traditionally values society and education more than we do. They've invested massively in STEM education and research, we haven't. Basic population distribution suggests that if you've got 1bn people, they're going to produce more intelligent people than a country with a population of <100m. Especially when in some of those countries, intelligence is racist and a symbol of opression.

I think the bigger problem with society is we've both enabled mass surveillance, protestor suppression and restrictions on free speech, and many seem quite content with this. Until perhaps they're on the receiving end of those tools of oppression, but by then it's too late.

[b0llchit]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

F(L)OSS is normally not written with any illegal purpose in mind. The software is written for someone, often the author, for a specific task. When the author publishes the software, which is legal, with a copyleft license, then that too is legal. The author can not account for what others do with the software from the point of publication. Otherwise you need to make it illegal to publish software.

You can compare it to "inventing" a new colour and painting your private wall in that colour. Now somebody sees that wall and asks if he may use that specific hue and you agree. When he then uses that hue and paints his car in that colour, it cannot be the original painter's fault if that colour may not be used on a car.

There are no secrets in software that you publish as F(L)OSS. There is no law telling you that it is not allowed to use a specific combination of numbers in a specific sequence^(*). That is how software works. Software is a conceptual model expressed in numbers. Software only has an effect when executed on a computational device.

^(*) _{Yes, yes, there are lots of repressive regimes that try hard to mute any concious thought. That said, you will need to disallow extremely basic mathematics to suppress computational concepts and programs from proliferating.}

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

(*) Yes, yes, there are lots of repressive regimes that try hard to mute any concious thought. That said, you will need to disallow extremely basic mathematics to suppress computational concepts and programs from proliferating.

There have been some fascinating examples from history where that's been tried. So WW2 Germany, where it was decided that 'Jewish physics' was verbotten. Which resulted in a number of Jewish physicists and other scientists fleeing Germany, and being welcomed by other nations. Who then got a leg up in quantum physics, so we got the bomb and Germany didn't. And then there was this chappy in Russia-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.

Where history has arguably been repeating itself, as revealed by some of the Twitter internal dumps.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

"Basic population distribution suggests that if you've got 1bn people, they're going to produce more intelligent people than a country with a population of <100m. Especially when in some of those countries, intelligence is racist and a symbol of opression."

You get into the age old argument of nature vs. nurture, but in essence, correct. People that are naturally more intelligent will be more systematic in exploring the world around them and have an increased ability to solve problems. When you couple those billion people with a governmental and cultural push towards learning that has real world applications, other countries need to watch out.

I don't see many articles about the Chinese pushing for 27 bathrooms in public spaces to accommodate every person's differing gender identification. The don't seem to be wasting time and energy arguing about letting boys participate on girls's sports teams. On one end of the spectrum, you have totalitarianism and on the other it's a free-for-all liberal agenda (is there a word for that?). China seems to lean towards the former. There's a lot of first world nonsense they aren't going to put up with.

Not only is intelligence racist, so is meritocracy, according to some. I exclude myself from those groups.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

On one end of the spectrum, you have totalitarianism and on the other it's a free-for-all liberal agenda (is there a word for that?)

I think that's just basic liberalism, but arguably that's been corrupted. So we have 'liberals' who demand X, or else. So increasingly people who view themselves as liberal, are actually acting in a totalitarian or authoritarian manner. I've also heard this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper#The_paradox_of_tolerance

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

used a lot to justify acting in an authoritarian and intolerant way, presumably by people who never botherered reading past the first sentence.

[Zolko]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

Tolerance is a funny concept. The things that we "tolerate " are actually unpleasant things, because not tolerating them would be even more unpleasant. Think a noisy neighbour: you might "tolerate" some occasional noise if it's rare because you very well know that you might make some occasional noises in the future, and therefore "tolerating" the unpleasant noise is better than calling the police for telling your neighbor to be quiet. You don't "tolerate" pleasant things because you actively wish them.

So I don't really understand people who ask for "tolerance" because they acknowledge implicitly that the know that they are unpleasant for their neighbours but they do it anyway. Such people are, in reality, self-serving narcissist that want everybody else to accept – and even be happy about it – that they fart under other people's nose.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

"I think that's just basic liberalism, but arguably that's been corrupted."

Yes and that's why I wondered if some new word was being used. In some things, I'm fairly liberal and in others I can be very conservative. Overall I'd probably be classed as conservative. I also tend to vote for politicians rather than parties. I've seen plenty of candidates with good ideas that would have no way to join or be sponsored by the two more mainstream clubs so wind up in some also-ran party which is unfortunate. Mind you, I do find most of the US minor parties to be completely bonkers.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

"It has a rather large population that traditionally values society and education more than we do. They've invested massively in STEM education and research, we haven't. Basic population distribution suggests that if you've got 1bn people, they're going to produce more intelligent people than a country with a population of <100m."

I have an interesting datapoint to the contrary, and a major theoretic problem as well.

This is a story of two Indians I worked with at IBM. One, raised in the US, was one of the best programmers that I have worked with. He was certainly much better than I was at the time. The other held a very senior position at IBM, and had a responsibilities including managing a team of twenty Indian programmers. Over the course of a program (almost three years), that team identified 0 unique bugs. As opposed to the team of four (including the first mentioned Indian) who identified dozens.

It's not the size of the population. It's not the level of education in the formal sense. It is the culture.

American culture has historically been much more encouraging of risk-taking and challenging authority than other places. THAT is where you get the new ideas that revolutionize things. A population of a billion people fearing for their lives if they offend the wrong member of the Party is NOT going to invent at the rate of a much smaller group that encourages hackery.

[MachDiamond]

Re: Restrictions != F(L)OSS

"It's not the level of education in the formal sense. It is the culture."

There are plenty of cultures with heavily defined strata which has be watched out for. Education is a good thing, but you have to start with somebody that has the ability to take advantage of that education. Maybe someday there will be some way to sort out what the best path might be for a particular person with a high level of precision.

The number of people in a country as large as China with good technical abilities will be greater. That doesn't mean the percentage has changed and it doesn't take into account how a very small sample will perform. I've seen plenty of examples of coding by people educated in India and it scares me. They seem to have been very poorly prepared by their educational system which is going to mask if those people had any potential in the first place. Culture may also play a factor if students are discouraged from ever asking any questions. Richard Feynman had a story about teaching in South America (Brazil?) where the students were taught to respond by rote rather than needing to understand the material. Certainly a breakdown of how the subjects were taught and maybe some cultural issues as well.

[Howard Sway]

Open source software today is playing a critical role in bad things!

Wheels and hammers are too! And electricity! And other things!

Solution : ban all the things!

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Open source software today is playing a critical role in bad things!

One thing at a time. But the world's gone slightly mad-

https://time.com/6242949/exercise-industry-white-supremacy/

The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness

Errm.. right. I never trusted runners, but I also get the feeling the Time article may have been taken slightly out of context. I guess there is some truth in it given the dark times around the 1900's where eugenics was considered a good thing. But I think most people would generally consider exercise to be postive for health. Unless you take it to extremes, but that's extremists for you.

But perhaps it's time for some self-reflection. Time's rebranded it's 'Man of the Yea' to 'Person of the Year', and awarded it to a whole country. Yet time is one of the biggest symbols of oppression and colonialism. Once upon a time, we used to be able to do things in our own time, until a colonial system was imposed on us. Then to further oppress us, alarm clocks were invented so servants could be woken up so their master's breakfasts were ready, and their newspapers and magazines were freshly ironed. It's also fundamentally racist, as recent evens have shown. Why should Australians get to celebrate a happy new year, before the UK does? Everyone should be free to celebrate a new year in their own time.

[Richard 12]

Re: Open source software today is playing a critical role in bad things!

Alarm clocks were invented so you wouldn't need to employ a knocker-upper. And knocker-uppers are due to shift work in factories and offices, not household servants.

Whether bells are worse than being knocked up is an open question.

[abetancort]

Re: Open source software today is playing a critical role in bad things!

It’s what they do. They celebrate the new year in their own time.

[Paul Crawford]

Most FOSS is written in English, so just ban the Bad Guys (tm) from speaking English, simplez!

But more seriously, you have two approaches to restricting FOSS: one is to deny its use via a license, but who will enforce that in those countries? The second is to deny access by having a "Great firewall of the West" but we know how hard that is to make work against anyone smart enough to code, and the simple option of blocking whole countries at the BGP would allow authoritarian regimes to further control their people's minds by blocking a view of the rest of the world. Neither would do much good.

Really the main sanction that can usefully be employed against them is to block the supply of hardware needed to make any of that work, and to deny direct support (as most companies did by withdrawing from Russia after Putin's invasion of Ukraine).

[BOFH in Training]

ALL FOSS is written with digits and / or alphabets and / or punctuation marks.

Let's ban bad guys from using them!

[T. F. M. Reader]

If the "bad guys" in question are Chinese then I suspect even prohibition on punctuation marks wouldn't inconvenience them too much. Prohibition on letters of alphabet or digits - even less so.

I don't know Chinese, so any more authoritative comment on the sentence above will be appreciated. My point is, rather, that the comment I am replying to may be even more to the point than originally intended.

[abetancort]

Once something has been published on internet, trying to block it from someone is like trying to contain the sea with just your hands. Impossible.

[Anonymous Coward]

I get the feeling the questions being asked by governments are not truly honest. Open source is a threat to propriety software. If you can lock down open source you make it harder to develop leaving private companies free to take all of that space. You also stifle innovation. Using the military and surveillance uses to me feels just like the "won't someone think of the children" argument when it comes to privacy and encryption. Capitalism does not like free when someone could be making a profit from it or a profit from it not being available. Look at how much food we throw away for proof of that. Also who decides who can have access and to what?

Open source is what it is, open and it should stay like that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most if not all proprietary software uses open source.

At my last place we use to buy in an imaging library for windows. They claim to be the best in the world.

We created our own for non-windows. By the time I left we had the capability to use the non-windows one on windows. Politics at board level stopped us plus I gave up arguing. Would have saved a fortune as we always got screwed over financially when we upgraded the imaging library and the upgrade never went smoothly (too many regressions in the library).

When I dug deep into the proprietary library I found it was using all the same libraries we were using but statically linked into thier DLL's with name mangling of some sort (binary sequence searches for known unique strings). Thier commercial licence made no mention of the OS libraries they were using.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Open source databases and operating systems containing contributions from Russian/Chinese/Venezuelan developers and so must be banned.

Also thank you Oracle and Microsoft for you campaign contributions

[klh]

You should definitely mention the vendor and which library they were using, especially if they broke the license.

[Binraider]

Availability of communications is one way for the dissidents to coordinate their opposition to the state. Modems were indispensable in coordination of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Locking down access is probably counter to desirable outcomes.

Now where FOSS is being used in something sinister, one would argue that cutting it now is after the horse has already bolted. After all, if you are in that environment you've already downloaded the source code you want to use. Probably.

[Yes Me]

Absurd

This whole article is based on the absurd notion that the side the author seems to believe they are on is in some way superior to some hypothetical other side. The biggest blunder made by the "Western" side in recent years, trumpeted by tRump but not originating with him, has been to start a self-defeating trade war with China at the point in history where the only war worth starting is a war on the unsustainable practices that are destroying the human habitat. Trying to bring FOSS into this war is simply the height of absurdity.

What word in "open source" doesn't the author understand?

[thames]

Re: Absurd

The article is based on the assumption that the US government will dictate terms to the rest of the world and everyone will fall in line. The word isn't like that. It's worth remembering by the way that the RISC-V organization moved out of the US specifically to get away from this sort of thing.

Once politically based license restrictions start there would be no end to them. Loads of people will start putting in license terms that say things like "cannot be used by anyone who does business with the US military". That's why this sort of thing would backfire on the US.

If you think that's a bit over the top, if you follow the links associated with the "advocate" promoting this idea, you will find that the licenses being promoted as being "ethical" do exactly that.

The Tornado Cash example was a complete red herring, as it's the Tornado Cash company who were being blacklisted for money laundering, not the source code. The Github repo is still on line, but the company's access to it has been frozen. There's nothing to stop someone else from forking the code and continuing on with it.

There's a good reason why proper Free Software has no restrictions on fields of endeavour. Once you bring politics into software licenses the entire field would Balkanise into incompatible licenses and the entire field of software would fall into the hands of a few big proprietary vendors who would base their business on having huge teams of lawyers who can navigate the licensing issues in each country.

[SolarDesalination]

Simon spent an entire week writing an article and putting it on full blast that he doesn't understand what open source is, and that he has a rudimentary understanding of geopolitics. I expected something insightful and I got a warhawk writing fear-mongering drivel.

[captain veg]

Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

Russia's invasion of Ukraine is certainly unethical, stupid, and counterproductive.

As a pacifist I should like to see all such acts of aggression outlawed. But they are, inexplicably, not right now,

So who is to say that Russia's land-grab is actually illegal? (Rather than unethical, stupid, counterproductive, etc.)

-A.

[doublelayer]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

There are international laws, enacted in treaties, which specify when you can use violence against another country. The most famous ones are U.N. and Geneva conventions, but there are others. There are lots of exceptions to such things. None of those exceptions apply to Russia. Here are some examples:

1. If your country didn't sign them, then they don't apply to you. Russia signed them.

2. If your enemies are a country you didn't recognize, you have a claim that it's not a country and therefore doesn't come under some of the regulations. Russia recognizes that Ukraine is a country.

3. If your destruction is something you arranged but not done by your military, you can find a sneaky way to argue it wasn't you that invaded. Russia's using its own soldiers.

They are in violation of international laws on the use of military forces which they agreed to follow. Their invasion is illegal. Sadly, the ICJ doesn't have the power to make them stop doing it, even though it has the authority to judge them for it.

[SolarDesalination]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

The problem with the ICJ is that the USA won't abide by its rulings if they ruled against the USA. The illegal invasion of Iraq for example, is something the ICJ couldn't prosecute because the USA is not a state member.

IOW it's a another tool of imperialism for the USA to go after nations it's in competition with that it wants to convince the international community it has moral superiority over.

[Claptrap314]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

The ICJ was explicitly formed to be hostile to the US and Israel. I've not bothered digging far enough to figure out who else was on the original hit list.

But a court which does operate according to the classical Western concepts of the law is one I'm not interested in submitting to. And yes, this means that my list of countries that I would be interested in touring is relatively limited.

[Sanguma]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

It's actually a bit more complicated than that. If the treaty's multilateral and has been adhered to by sufficient states, it then becomes international customary law, which is to say, "ignorance is not an excuse" - every state is regarded as having known and understood it as part and parcel of their acceptance into the international community.

In the case of Russia invading Ukraine, as in the case of the US invading Iraq, or the Ruritanians invading Elbonia, there is a general law, the UN charter, which specifically prohibits the casual use and abuse of force by nations. There are also specific regional agreements, in the case of Europe the set of treaties concluded at the end of the Cold War, such as the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, and also specific agreements between the two parties concerned, such as the Budapest Memorandum.

Sadly, the Ruritanians never hold to any of the agreements they claim to hold so dear. It's going to be a long hard slog for the Elbonians, but I'm sure they'll survive and come out stronger than before.

[Zolko]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

which they agreed to follow. Their invasion is illegal

funny "argument" : you claim that Russia's invasion is illegal because of Russian laws ?

On the other hand, I can give you fast 3 reasons why that invasion is actually legal, but it wouldn't be very useful because, as you say, there is nobody to enforce such "legality". What really matters at the end is : the winner writes history. The USA/UK did many war crimes during WW2 – bombing of Dresden, nuclear bombs on Japan, concentration camps for Japanese in the US ... – but because they ended victorious they could get away with it. So it boils down to this: if Russia wins then the invasion was legal, if they lose it was illegal.

[Irony Deficient]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

So who is to say that Russia’s land-grab is actually illegal? (Rather than unethical, stupid, counterproductive, etc.)

Regarding the invasion of Ukraine, see article II. of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, to which the USSR was a party when the Pact became effective on 1929-07-24, and for which all of the USSR’s constituent republics became legal successors when the USSR was dissolved:

The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.

Thus, the invasion of Ukraine, as a settlement of a dispute between parties of the Pact which is not being conducted by pacific means, is plainly illegal. However, since the Pact lacks an enforcement mechanism, one could reasonably ask what value the Pact provides to pacifists — let alone to Ukrainians (or provided to e.g. Afghans and Iraqis, since Afghanistan, Iraq, the US, the UK, Australia, &c. are also parties to the Pact).

[captain veg]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

Thanks everyone.

So who, exactly, is to say that it's illegal, rather than immoral, stupid, unethical, counterproductive, etc?

It certainly should be. It's not clear to me that it is.

-A.

[Jellied Eel]

Re: Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine

So who, exactly, is to say that it's illegal, rather than immoral, stupid, unethical, counterproductive, etc?

Therein lies the problem. As others have said, there isn't really any such thing as 'International Law', only Treaties, Agreements and national legislation. A good example of that is probably the US ITAR, and similar legislation is also enacted in many other countries-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_Regulations#ITAR_and_information_technology

The ease with which USML items can be exported and retransferred using computer networks and removable media significantly increases the risk of unauthorized retransfer of USML items. As discussed above, carrying a laptop computer which contains USML items overseas is considered a retransfer of those items. Likewise, access to USML items on corporate systems, such as intranets, by foreign persons overseas or in the U.S., is considered a Retransfer of the items. Foreign employees working in the US cannot have access to the same network where ITAR data may be stored, nor may they have access to rooms or facilities where ITAR work is being done.

It is important to note that, in both cases, theoretical access to the USML items overseas or by foreign persons is sufficient to constitute a breach of ITAR. Files on a laptop carried overseas do not need to be opened overseas, and foreign persons do not need to have actual access to USML items on computer networks for a breach to occur.

USML being the US Munitions List, which already includes software, and that might include 'Open Source' elements. That's lead to some.. Interesting challenges in designing sufficiently secure/airgapped/audited networks that properly segregate ITAR material from non-US nationals. Plus there's also practical aspects, like building/converting a broom cupboard for the US network/sysadmin that adminsters the ITAR bits. Especially as they have to be securely locked up. With sysadmins, that's arguably a GoodThing(tm).

Penalties for breaching ITAR regulations are harsh, as are other national equivalents. But enforcement might be complicated, ie if I broke ITAR, US could charge me, then I'd have to be extradited and face the US justice system. Obviously that gets trickier if the person is a national, or being sheltered by a nation that doesn't have extradition treaties.

It's much the same with challenges like war crimes. There have been attempts to create international courts to prosecute those, but they can be pretty toothless, if nations don't recognise their legitimacy. So someone could be prosecuted and convicted in absentia by an international court, but if they're sheltered, the conviction is largely meaningless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes, this does sound like a positively brilliant idea from the usual geopolitical fanatics in the U Ass of A. [/SARCASM]

Both Russia and China have no issue with using flat out espionage-stolen software, so what makes them think that they're going to "respect" a paperwork request not to use something?

But this is all about appearing to "do something", conveniently ignoring the fact that the entire planet contributes to open source, and is in no way likely to tolerate American geopolitical nonsense being shoved down their throats. They're more likely to respond by banning everyone from using the software any further, including the Americans.

What is it with the political and military stuffed shirts in the US that has them so convinced that the world is going to go along with their hegemonistic plans? Near as I can see, that's the same mind-set Putin has : "the world OWES us". :(

[Roland6]

> conveniently ignoring the fact that the entire planet contributes to open source

I also noted how the article omits or ignores the contribute to part.

The question with respect to say Huawei’s fork of Android, is are they contributing back? if not how can we encourage or make them? And thus make the changes available to review and cherry picked for inclusion in other projects.

I would tentatively suggest by allowing full participatory access to open source, we continue to make it easy and natural for developers to contribute back, which from an intelligence pov may provide instructive.

Fundamentally, for developers to be using open source for undesirable purposes, someone and most probably a government is paying them to do so. It is this political motivation we need to be targeting.

[TheInstigator]

I'm not sure how you could go about doing that - although it's a good start.

Say for example - a knife - on the one hand it's an essential survival tool if you're out in the wild - and even in the home environment to prepare your meal etc you need a knife right?

However you can use that same knife and kill someone with it - the knife isn't good or bad - it's the intention of the person wielding the knife which is good or bad ... and I'm not sure how you can go about legislating or incentivising someone not to be a bad person or have bad intentions - that's why jails exist

[thinking ape]

The issue with 'free speech' is ...

..that there is little mention of the flip side, responsibility.

The free speech advocates keep seeming to claim that you should be allowed to say anything, with no limitations. They fail to remember, that in the USA, it just means the government can't legally lock you up when criticising the government/religion/ideology etc.

It doesn't mean you can say whatever you want without consequences. Start shouting fire/bomb in a crowded place with no good reason

Ditto with open source. We need to understand how our software can be abused, and if it's likely it will cause significant suffering then maybe it would be our responsibility to consider if we release it or not.

Then again, some people are single issue people who don't see the wider picture of how society works and holds together

[SolarDesalination]

Re: The issue with 'free speech' is ...

Responsibility should come with the code one designs and programs to ensure it's secure and stable.

Open source is a relatively simple concept. Trying to do what this article is doing, attaching it to global politics, is silly. The only countries that have signed up to a sanctions regime against Russia are the EU, Canada, Australia/NZ, and Japan. South Korea and Singapore have enacted lighter sanctions.

You have the entire middle east, all of south America, Mexico, the continent of Africa, central Asia, southeast Asia, and India that perceive the war as an Atlantic regional conflict and don't care to participate.

All of the world contributes to FOSS development, and to say that because America and the UK shouldn't have it's developers contribute to open source that a south African is contributing to, or a Malaysian, etc. Is super euro-centric and super chauvanistic.

The reason codes of conduct or mission statements or other governance principles are attached to Open source as add-ons, is because if someone tries to change the concept of open source, it's no longer open source, its some warped political thing that will never survive.

[TheInstigator]

Re: The issue with 'free speech' is ...

"The reason codes of conduct or mission statements or other governance principles are attached to Open source as add-ons, is because if someone tries to change the concept of open source, it's no longer open source, its some warped political thing that will never survive."

Maybe this is what's needed - open source needs to die?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The issue with 'free speech' is ...

So you are basically saying we should stop doing open source because someone could use it for nefarious purposes.

What next? Ban cars because someone could intentionally run someone over?

[Justthefacts]

Re: The issue with 'free speech' is ...

No, you don’t have to stop doing open-source because it could be used for nefarious purposes. But you *should*: consider whether what you are providing is a small generic cog, or a big machine with potential implications. Provide safeguards where possible. Think about the ethical implications of use *and misuse* yourself. For larger projects - involve colleagues, and people *not* in the industry for a wider perspective. As an industry, it clearly needs massively wider and informed regulation - support it, seek to drive it. And almost most importantly, stop sabotaging regulation and standards wherever they are mooted, just to promote a narrow, destructive, and super-political agenda of free speech without consequences. Doctors have ethics committees, clinical studies have ethics approvals boards, engineers get ethics lectures at Uni. Taxi-drivers get CRB checked, FFS. Why do you think you are exempt from normal ethical principles of regulation?

“ Ban cars because someone could intentionally run someone over?”

No. *As an automotive engineer*, please just stop actively fighting and sabotaging: NCAP Standards, breathalyser interlocks, ADAS such as anti-speeding monitoring, odometer anti-tamper (which would be banned by the FOSS license), automotive vehicle type approval (also banned by FOSS license). Some of these features you may personally approve of, some not, all have an ethical dimension, but you have to abide by the considered view of society and regulatory bodies. Not just go off on your own, and decide that “I should be able to make any car I like and let buyers decide for themselves”. That’s just dangerous insanity.

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: The issue with 'free speech' is ...

Free speech alows you to say things not everybody likes or agrees with. They are free to shout at you for being wrong, debate with you. But in some countries (including, regrettably the U K) there are those who consider valid "consequences" to include being attacked or killed. This is not acceptable in civilized society.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Not just software

Russian artillery uses Newtonian mechanics to calculate the path of shells. Britain must regulate the export of Newton's laws

[TheInstigator]

Re: Not just software

Trust me - if they could they would!

[Justthefacts]

Re: Not just software

GPS receivers use relativistic mechanics to calculate precision corrections, and can be used to calculate the paths of missiles. Not just Britain, but also the EU and US, should consider potential mis-use by aggressors, and impose regulatory software restrictions on *civilian* receivers, refusing to indicate position when they detect the altitude higher than 18,000meters and speed 1000knots.

Oh, wait. They do. CoCOM countries are now replaced by the Wassenaar Arrangement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinating_Committee_for_Multilateral_Export_Controls

This applies to Galileo receivers too. And Glonass actually.

[Sceptic Tank]

I got caught

This article is clickbait.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I got caught

An article which generates as much discussion as this one has is not what I usually consider "clickbait." "Clickbait" does not mean "I don't like this article."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I got caught

The headline sent my blood pressure sky-rocketing - not good for a person in my condition. :/

[Bartholomew]

Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

https://twitter.com/FoolsDelight/status/1591707060324163588

The creators of some advanced passive radar software, none of who were based in the US, deleted it from github, removed it from their Linux ISO on MEGA and basically took everything to do with it including documentation websites fully offline and contacted lawyers, once they were made aware that their source code might be in breach of ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations).

But github is based in the US and owned by a US company and that would probably be enough of a hook for an extradition order by the US government if they wanted.

(SDR is Software Defined Radio)

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

WOW. Could you (or somebody reading this) send a story suggestion to El Reg? My email may be black-holed as it is within the Hetzner network (I once send a suggestion to On Call and never received any reply).

[Bartholomew]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

One problem about trying to create a news article would be that the key people involved (One that I know of in Australia and one in Budapest) will have been advised by their legal experts to say absolutely nothing.

And there was an article previously posted on Hackaday, so it would be extremely difficult to dig up any new information.

[GrumpenKraut]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

Thanks for the link. =---->

[Roland6]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

>> But github is based in the US and owned by a US company and that would probably be enough of a hook for an extradition order by the US government if they wanted.

The location of key open source repositories in the US has been a concern going back decades, there is probably now sufficient reason and concern over future US government policy (which this article alludes to) for the open source community to relocate repositories and their control to outside the US.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

That's a relatively soft problem, it's easy to replicate a repository.

The problem is if US corporations are scared off using/ contributing to a particular project.

I'm guessing that major projects are a big enough part of $$$ that the politicians aren't going to suddenly try and ban them.

[TheInstigator]

Re: Here is an example of FOSS for SDR that vanished due to ITAR

Rest assured that I'm sure the Americans (as well as several other countries) have got a copy of the software - it's just not available for the likes of you and me

[3arn0wl]

A knife is a knife

A great bit of technology that can be used to cut a slice of bread... or someone's throat.

The murderer isn't the knife : the inanimate object has no culpability.

I hope that techies in China do manage to produce some really powerful RISC-V kit this year. And that it becomes available for everyone to use. (And Huawei ought to be looking at contributing to Linux-phone solutions, imo).

Moreover, as the evolution of things goes : everything eventually becomes common knowledge enough to be free and open source. Everything from fire to an Instruction Set Architecture.

---

I can't restrain myself from being political, sorry.

Fear-mongering has been a tactic of Authoritarian governments for decades, used to get people to accept things like annexation. Fundamentally, open source is a wonderful Libertarian thing : freely sharing the best ideas, skills, contributions of time and effort, to produce solutions that the purveyors of proprietary systems can only dream of.

[TheInstigator]

Re: A knife is a knife

I wholeheartedly agree @3arn0wl

[IGotOut]

Just to clarify...

Is it OK to allow an authoritarian regime, with a proven appalling track record in human rights abuses, murder of journalists and corruption at the highest level? No, no, not the evil Chinese government, but the lovely huggable Saudis.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Just to clarify...

See that's the great flexibility of a software licence.

Contributor 1: this software is not for use in Saudi

Contributor 2: this software is not for use in Israel

Customer: my government bans any boycott of Israel so is it illegal for me to use this software or is it illegal for me not to ?

[seldom]

Simon just don't drink the kool-aid

Sorry, Simon just stop drinking the kool-aid.

[tekHedd]

What is the Matrix?

Control.

Yet another power play against FOSS, using the recently mainstreamed and highly streamlined "Fighting Injustice" arguments that are currently trendy as leverage. When they come to take your freedom, it's always "for the children."

Remember, if the title of the article is a question, you can safely answer "No," and get on with your life without reading it.

[TheInstigator]

Re: What is the Matrix?

I agree with your last statement - the trouble is there are people thinking like this and other people who are listening and will take action based on such reports.

Remember the statement:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" is often attributed to Burke despite the debated origin of this quote. In 1770, it is known that Burke wrote in "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents":

(Source - Wikipedia)

Just ignoring stuff unfortunately doesn't make it go away - that's why we have the politicians we have now in the UK - an absolute shower of .... brown stuff

[Binraider]

Many of the above arguments concern FOSS being used in, e.g. weapon guidance. What if your commercial software is used the same way? Is the commercial software vendor, publisher, or author responsible? All of the above?

The answer to question cannot be different for FOSS to commercial. And I’m pretty sure dissection of the various drones being used right now has revealed the presence of western made components; even if they were intended for entirely different uses (e.g. commercial cameras being fitted to drones).

Is the camera manufacturer guilty?

Or the exporter who allowed them to cross the border? Possibly fully knowing what they are actually being used in?

As noted elsewhere, guns don’t kill people. Rappers do. Blame the (Mis-)user.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Linux Foundation declined to comment and then did not reply when I asked why it had declinede to comment. The Apache Foundation did not reply."

Some people might have taken the hint, and stopped to wonder whether they really wanted to publish a contender for Stupidest Article of 2023 on January 1.

The whole point of FOSS is to prevent the distribution of knowledge from being restricted, for whatever purpose. Asking two of the organisations most associated with this principle whether they think they should tear it up and stamp all over it is hardly likely to get a positive response, is it?

If I were the author I'd think myself lucky they didn't respond.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why stop there?

Please also revert every PR ever made by the geopolitically undesirables in order to make open source pure again, then call it freedom source.

Keep your fucking politics out of open source!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let open source be

Open source should not be banned anywhere, instead we human should find ways to actually reduce the power of the government. Seems like government all over the world are out of control these days.

What human need is more freedom not more embargo. Imagine removing the ingenuity of close to 2 billions of people from the technology community, because some gangster who like to impose themselves on others are out of control

[Conor Stewart]

Ethical licenses? Really?

Do they really think ethics based licenses will make any kind of difference? You really think someone using the code to make weapons is going to look at the license, see it isn't allowed to be used for making weapons and then stop?

Anyone using open source code for purposes like that isn't going to care about what license it has, I doubt they even look at it anyway.

As for drone autopilot software, a lot of what is used is commercially available drones, DJI drones are used to drop bombs in Ukraine, they dont use open source software. Who knows what large military specific drones are running but it won't just be an open source project like betaflight or ardupilot.

Open source should stay as it is, any attempts to control it's use or who can access it will lead to the decline of open source in general and lower people's trust in it, like the open source project that caused damage to computers in Russia. That is not what open source is for or about, it is there for collaboration and to be available to everyone.

[DustFox]

already BS

Didn't even bother to read after couple of lines. If you already started with Putin regime

[Zolko]

Re: already BS

These days I always write about the US government as the "Biden regime ".

[heyrick]

Another €0,02 to the discussion

Knife manufacturers aren't responsible for stabbings.

Gun manufacturers aren't responsible for shootings.

Car manufacturers aren't responsible for hit and runs.

These companies make "stuff", sell it, and anticipate that people will use "stuff" in a responsible manner. The overwhelming majority do, but you're always going to get that one twat that thinks it's okay to use a vehicle as a moving projectile. This is the fault of them, not the car or the manufacturer.

Why should software be any different? Most people will use Linux or Windows (talking about FOSS is just obfuscation) for useful purposes. And once in a while, somebody will use it for malicious purposes. It's on them, not all those involved in making the software.

Unless somebody uploads "improved guidance system for missiles" (or whatever) onto GitHub, the best approach is to not get involved with the politics, and accept that once you release something to the world, there are the odd few who won't respect the licence and won't use the code for good. But, we come full circle and can say the exact same thing about closed source products.

[Lil Endian]

GitHub: "improved guidance system for missiles"

Well, that's a way of getting an attack vector on <<insert evil government of choice>>!!

[JDX]

Slippery Slope

It sounds admirable to stop FOSS being used "for evil purposes or to do harm". But who is going to decide what is evil/harmful? Do we want FOSS being banned based on political idealogies?

[Claptrap314]

Re: Slippery Slope

Yes. That's exactly what this is about.

[Zolko]

Re: Slippery Slope

who is going to decide what is evil ?

Easy : the US oligarchs. (sounds scarier than "billionaires")

[TheInstigator]

Re: Slippery Slope

"Easy : the US oligarchs. (sounds scarier than "billionaires")"

Yes! Cause we can always trust them to do good - cough cough - Trump - cough

What I find funny about Trump's attempted insurrection is that the US itself was founded on several acts of insurrection - and when Trump tried it and it didn't work he's getting lambasted - but if he succeeded he would have been lauded.

It's a very weird world in which we're in.

[MrKosmos]

So we need a non-military license. Sounds easy enough, since we already have a non-commercial one.

The thing is, I'm willing to bet chinese companies don't care about NC anyway since no individual or even company would dare sue.

Which makes the only option to stop a rogue government a backdoor in your code, but that raises massive issues on its own.

I suppose there is no way to win with FOSS here... At least releasing for all sides makes it fair

[StrangerHereMyself]

Sanctions leak

Usage of open-source software cannot be controlled, by its very nature. But let me state for the record that I predicted early on that open-source will eventually be pointed out as a sanctions "leak" and politicians will want to respond to that, especially the U.S. Government.

RISC-V for example allows both China and Russia to keep up with cutting-edge Western CPU technology without having to worry about sanctions or licenses.

At some point in time I predict the U.S. Government will act, either by sanctioning the leaders of the RISC-V International organization in Switzerland or by prohibiting U.S. companies from transferring technology to the organization.

[TheInstigator]

I find this article - and others like it - a bit boring now ...

... there appears to be a constant rhetoric of portraying China as "a baddie" and it's a very short step to that portrayal being extended automatically by human nature to anyone of that race.

Asking the US whether they think Open Source software should be included in any embargo etc against China, Russia (shall we call them the Axis of evil - and why wasn't Syria and Iran mentioned - or is it OK for them to have access to Open Source software?) is a bit like asking a kid if they want to visit a sweet shop - given their objective, of course they will want to deny any method for their opposition to achieve their objective. You might as well ask someone whether they want more money or not and then be surprised at their answer when they say yes!

The US has past form at playing the national security card to keep opponents down and over time it hasn't worked - if the West wants to categorically stop Russia, China, Syria, North Korea from achieving any kind of dominance the easiest way is to just nuclear bomb them back to the stone age - to draw an analogy in World War 2 it wasn't diplomacy that worked - it was the levelling of 2x Japanese cities and fighting the Nazis to Berlin that won the war - to repeat this but on a bigger scale ... well that's just bringing order, democracy and the rule of law to the world right? Other empires have done the same - Roman, Greek etc - empires are built on blood - not words.

Speaking of words - why isn't the West trying to open dialogue with Russia re. Ukraine? If anything it seems as if Turkey is doing more at trying to achieve a diplomatic solution that the West is - all the West appear to be doing is supplying Ukraine with just enough weaponry to fight the Russians to a draw - but not enough for Ukraine to retake their country or achieve a decisive win ... it's almost like they're just fighting to drain Russia's resources ....

As I've always said - I'm not saying Russia and China are "good" countries - but "good" is relative right? One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter - The US hasn't given America back to the Native Americans, the Australians haven't done that to the Aboriginies ... The US and UK invaded Iraq and deposed its leader with no UN mandate etc - no country is perfect ...

How far does everyone want to take it? How about EVERYONE on the world dies - the ultimate in equal opportunities ...

[amanfromMars 1]

Long runs the fox .... but there’s no really safe place to hide and prosper.

The one sure thing about bullies is that they always get what they thoroughly deserve in a usually most just and appropriately painful and particularly humiliating comeuppance, for no one is safe and secure and immune from smarter competition which only an ignorant fool or arrogant lunatic would oppose with all manner and means of unsustainable bankrupting attack.

And the bigger the picture, the greater the damage that can be all too easily self-inflicted .....

amanfromMars [2301050508] ..... shares on https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/1/4/pentagon-leveraging-5g-to-fight-in-electromagnetic-spectrum

[Thank you. Your comment will be displayed soon after reviewing.]

Mikayla, Hi,

The questions you reveal being asked of the US Department of Defense regarding 5G and Use of Electromagnetic Spectrum have also been asked of China and Eastern contemporaries, which/who may or may not be much better prepared for the rapid progress such systems developments deliver, for such matters are invariably Strictly Need to Know Ultra Top Secret.

And that is said because of the exceptional similar equivalence emanating from these two quoted pieces on the same subject, one from your good self here .....

"To ensure the United States maintains its advantage over adversaries across an increasingly complex, congested and contested electromagnetic spectrum, or EMS, the Defense Department released its Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority Strategy in 2020. It called on the department to develop capabilities and policies that support electromagnetic spectrum operations — coordinated actions to exploit, attack, protect and manage the electromagnetic environment.

“In modern warfare, EMS superiority is a leading indicator and fundamental component of achieving superiority in air, land, sea, space or cyberspace,” the document said."

and the other from another elsewhere ......

"But what of the near future, China, in that other contested way out there space place and Live Operational Virtual Environment? Would the following statement be attractively agreeable? It is certainly neither designed nor shared here intentionally to be fractious or contentious.

Our engagement and exploration and exploitation of its other-worldly alien resources will quite naturally render extraordinarily forceful future insights and further novel ingredients for the clear leading advantage that such experience in the progressive delivery of vital modular infrastructure and secure failsafe communicative internetworking supply lines effortlessly provides for invaluable hindsight and almighty reflection and universal comprehension on/into what is much more a Greater IntelAIgent Games Play Arena with ACTive Cyber Threatening Areas, violently destructive and virulently toxic fields reserved and preserved for the capture and suitably just warrior treatment of future undesirables and present barbaric primitives alike."

[boatsman]

foss, breadknives and webcams too ??

people have been killed with breadknives.. and with drones equipped with common off the shelf web-cams (thats you, logitech... )

lets put them on the forbidden list for russia, saudi arabia, israel, the USA and china ( add your favourite repressive regime here <.....> )

why ?

they do not acknowledge the international court of justice, or simply ignore it. in common english : they think they are above the law.

sorry guys. no more bread cutting for you with my knives.. and no more logitech cams...

really ? anyone think this is realistic, effective or even theoretical logical ?

put the restriction in the license, if you want. "use of this code in order to invoke damage, hurt, death on anything, or anyone living or dead creature, including humans, is strictly prohibited"

this is forbiden anyway by any law, national or international, but go ahead. lets make sure.

thats enough. it will standup in court if the perp can be brought to justice. if not, we need to fix that. (exactly whats going on in ukraine right now ) , not the export list.

[00face]

Pfft

This is pretty dumb.I can totally hate someone, be against a group I feel is evil who can use open source software for malevolent and evil purposes. I still don't think it would be justify changing FOSS into a political tool. Even begging the question is pretty gross.

[technoscience]

Be careful what you wish for

If you want to limit Free and OpenSource, the first target would be to pull it from the US government, banks, Wallstreet, need to stop using it.

They have done more harm to the US citizens, and the world. Through fraud, lies, programs upon programs, over taxation (layers upon layers of taxes), devaluing the US currency, market manipulation, edicts by un elected officials, congress being bought by "donations" and lobbyists.

The US is NOT following the constitution nor the founding principles. Definitely not "For the people, by the people", Our votes are stolen by brides, and programs, and unelected people like the SEC and Fed Reserve.

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source is illegal

As far as I know, EU has banned its companies from providing digital services to Russia. Open Source does not exist in the vacuum, and if an organisation like GitHub allows to hosts codes, it must comply with the law and block access to it. Or if the publisher of a software package makes it available for free no matter whenever in the world, he/she is breaking the law. Yes you must comply with the law, e.g., only allow downloads from non-sanctioned countries otherwise you are distributing digital goods / services to sanctioned countries. You can't just say "oh but it's Open Source" and continue doing it like there are no implications to that. It's very much illegal, and if you don't want to do it yourself, you must delegate it to software publishers, like NPM for example, which will do it for you. I don't think many people realise how illegal Open Source really is, just because you want to wrap it in a "goodness for humanity" wrapper does not mean you don't have any legal responsibilities. There's no such thing is good/bad - it's a capitalist world and people need to wake up to that. At the moment, everyone can say do whatever they want to, never provide warranty / customer support and then justify it as "goodness" claiming they are building a better world. Are you really, or are you just tickling your own ego and self-importance? Capitalism is real, law is real and sanctions are real. Anybody who makes their open source code available to sanctioned countries while residing in countries like the EU that prevent that from happening, is breaking the law, and if they can't enforce non-download of their packages from npm and other registries, they must choose a platform where this can be enforced. Because somebody put something in the essentially public domain, does not void his/her responsibilities, and the caveat of not being able to delete your package from npm makes the whole Open Source enterprise technically illegal.